Meet Ricardo Navarro! He joined Visa as our new Visa Developer Community Manager. As Community Manager, he’ll be engaged in supporting and inspiring developers to become more familiar trying out the APIs connected with this new innovative platform. Below is a Q & A to help you get to know him better.
Why are you excited about Visa Developer and why did you join the team?
The Visa Developer program launched in February 2016, so it’s very exciting to be part of something that is growing so quickly. I decided to join the team for the opportunity to influence and help define Community engagement and to be able to build that from scratch, it’s the type of challenge I was looking for professionally. What’s great about the team is the passion behind making the platform and API services easy for developers to use. Working with a team whose goals are aligned with what I hope our Community grows into has made joining the team that much easier.
What are some of your responsibilities as Visa’s Developer Community Manager?
I wear a lot of hats! Mainly, my primary focus is to make sure I communicate developer pain points to our team. I provide feedback from our developers to our product and technology teams daily. This approach helps ensure we address our community and fold in their feedback to improve our products. This not only includes forum support but building content so our community can read through technical articles and blogs and find help on a variety of Visa Developer APIs. If you have any feedback for us please feel free to reach out to me at visadeveloper@visa.com
I also handle our Twitter social account @VisaDeveloper – follow us there for updates!
If you’ve ever attended a hackathon in the San Francisco Bay Area within the last two years, there’s a good chance we’ve met! I held dual roles as Sr. Project Manager and Community Manager for a developer relations agency, called BeMyApp. For a little over two years, I helped technology companies connect with developer communities through meetups, conferences, hackathons and online digital campaigns. This company specialized in setting the standard for developer marketing communications and engagement.
During my time at BeMyApp, I traveled all over the US meeting all types of developers in order to make sure we educated them on a variety of technologies. It was always inspiring for me to see bright developers build out applications in a matter of hours—quickly crank out code, learning about new APIs in a weekend and most importantly find time to network with their fellow developers. The developer community is one of a kind and I have been lucky enough to get to meet so many in cities all over the US.
What do you think is important when connecting with developers?
Developers are truly inspiring and fun innovators—filled with a lot of ideas without a lot of time. Communication and transparency is key, when connecting with developers. Especially if there are bugs or questions around code that need to be addressed. Namely, I think it’s important to listen carefully to get a better understanding of their point of view. Ultimately, this will help us improve our products.
What are the new projects which excite you?
We have so many projects in the works—however, what I most enjoy is meeting developers face to face in their own environment. I look forward to organizing and attending more Visa Developer events, globally to meet all of you! Stay tuned for more information about the new exciting events we have planned for you!
Wha
The Visa Developer team is a diverse group. The folks come from a wide range of backgrounds, which include technology, product, customer experience, marketing and development. What unifies the team is a common desire to continuously improve the platform and build new products and services so developers find it easier and easier to build real-world applications using Visa APIs.
What is the difference between visadeveloper@visa.com and developer@visa.com?
There are two ways to reach us. Visadeveloper@visa.com would be the easiest way to reach me or someone on my team focused on making sure we address feedback or pain points from developers or clients. This is also a great email for questions on events or meetups we are hosting.
Developer@visa.com is where you’ll connect to our technical support team who are there to help you with any questions you have while creating application.
Have any suggestions on blog topics or technical articles you’d like to read? Please email Ricardo at visadeveloper@visa.com. Thank you!
