Cloudflare Birthday Week Wrap-up

Thank you for joining me today to talk about Cloudflare Birthday Week and doing a quick wrap up. I am Rebekah, I work at Cloudflare and I am based out of the Austin office and I am joined by Hi, I'm Carlos Armada. I am a product manager for Registrar and I'm based in Denver, Colorado. Awesome, thank you Carlos. With it being your first Birthday Week, what surprised you the most? It was a fun, very fun week and really what's impressive, I mean over the week we had 46 different announcements and unlike some of the other innovation weeks where those announcements might skew more towards engineering, more technical, for Birthday Week we open the aperture and have announcements from the impact team, from the policy teams and you see this breadth come across the week which is really, really exciting because as a lead you get to work with a lot of different teams that you normally wouldn't work with. Additionally, the speed is basically ridiculous to be honest. We don't tell teams to like slow down launches or hold them for this week. I'm basically convinced you could run one of these every month and you'd have a similar amount of volume and that's just a testament to the speed at which Cloudflare moves and even the week before and this week, the week after, you'll see announcements that are Birthday Week worthy that were just ready to release. So between just the volume and the speed it's just really, really impressive to see given this was my first Birthday Week and a really, really fun one for that. Tell me a little bit about how you got roped into being one of the Birthday Week leads. Yeah, so I joined in January and was able to participate as an author in one of the first innovation weeks of the year in April and as a registrar product manager it was really great to be part of this innovation week and I saw a lot of value in being more connected to all the different parts of the organization and taking on one of these roles. So as we started to plan out the rest of the year, conversations with managers and different people, the opportunity arose and I put my name into the hat and was lucky enough to be chosen. That's really awesome. I know that you did such a great job and a lot of coordination went into this week. What's an announcement or moment that has kind of been your personal highlight? The registrar team did have one announcement but I wasn't going to answer it that one as being my favorite even though obviously it was one of my favorites but connected in some ways to one of my favorite announcements which was the CF CLI announcement and there's a few reasons this one stood out to me. The first one, it was a company-wide effort where we put a stake in the ground and said moving forward anything we build should be accessible via Cloudflare CLI and a big part of that is if you read the founder's letter and saw some of the communication around the week where it's like agentic traffic has already now exceeded human traffic on the Internet. The web and the Internet is different than what it used to be. We need to be building for this new version of the Internet and this was a representation of that. Going from our original Wrangler CLI with 280 commands to 3,000 commands, truly a shift in how you can programmatically or how an agent can programmatically use the entire product suite at Cloudflare from a terminal and when you also see the internal workings of what it took to get us there, not only was the Forge team and the CF CLI team instrumental in obviously getting this out, but all the teams across the company also who had API services needed to do some work to make sure that their product suite was represented as part of the CF CLI work and moving forward we've created new guidance framework codexes to make sure that any new product at Cloudflare is automatically part of this spec. So seeing that come together and then additionally the registrar piece which now is part of CF CLI, you can buy, manage, transfer domains all through it. It was really exciting not only to be one of the teams that benefited from the announcement but then being able to just see this shift in how people will be using the Cloudflare product suite programmatically. I think you're really highlighting well how much effort went into this Cloudflare birthday week from across the company. I don't think I've ever seen this much collaboration going into birthday week before. Whenever you're thinking about the working across all those teams, did you learn of anything new based on just being new at Cloudflare from teams? Definitely. One, this created an opportunity to work with teams such as the impact team, policy, even more so with the legal team making sure everything got reviewed. The research team, I mean there's I could keep going like the network performance team. I mean it's all of these different pieces that honestly when you're at Cloudflare and and working on your projects or with your teams, sometimes you can take for granted the the breadth and the scale at which we operate. So being able to see all those different pieces come to life and work with them, I mean I met a lot of new people and moving forward even as a product manager internally, I see a lot of value in being able to be like, hey I know what team works on this, let me reach out to them. And previously it's like obviously you could do that, but being on a first name basis or being the person who maybe helped review a blog post or something like that, it just helps so much with the interpersonal relationship building and all those pieces. And really as a product manager, the relationship building and being able to tie the dots between all the things is really really important. Not only do we have a really strong developer community that uses all the parts of our product, but our enterprise customers as well. You start to see when things launch like, oh wait this thing over here if I tie it with this thing that I did or that we're working on, we can package it and create like an even better experience. And I think some of the launches show you that in like taking pieces of what we already have at Cloudflare, whether it's AI Gateway or Registrar and embed it with other pieces, whether that's observability or all these different things to just make a more cohesive, better experience for our customers and all of our customers for that matter. So I see a lot of value and really excited to continue building on those relationships. I love that. We've been talking a lot about kind of the internal relationship building. What have you thought about like our customers? Have you seen any just heroic moments or moments that really stand out from customers or the community, from our socials or anything that you've seen? Yeah, I think one thing that I've really enjoyed by joining Cloudflare is seeing how passionate our developer community is. Sometimes that's good because we're told to do something better. Sometimes it's just to celebrate our wins. But no matter if you're on X or Discord or Reddit and Hacker News, I think what's been really fun to see is how engaged customers are with every single announcement. And maybe sometimes not even customers because they might not be Cloudflare customers yet, but an announcement convinces them to go, oh, let me try this new thing. So really, I'd expand that outside of the definition of customer and say just in general, the community, developer community. And I'm sure we'll have to rename even that community moving forward because more and more you're seeing non-developers engage with our product suite. But going back to my original point being, I keep returning to registrar, obviously, because that's what I work on. But we had five of the largest single day registrations over birth. So birthday weeks, five days, and every single day were our five largest days of domain registrations that we've ever had as a registrar. So when you think about that, and it's not even like there was one registrar announcement, but it's almost a proxy for just the amount of signal and excitement that there were for all the different announcements per day. And we were on Hacker News. I think one day we had three of the top five posts. I mean, that might be slightly wrong. But in general, the amount of signal in Hacker News and Clef was and still is the one or two top trending model on Hugging Face. So it's just really fun to see how in all these different places, not even owned by Cloudflare, you see that excitement and adoption being driven in those places, whether it's our actual data that shows you that, or these other community spaces, where people are talking about it, engaging with it, maybe giving us suggestions of how to make it better. All of that is really fun to see. And it's not, you know, I've been at companies previously where when you launch something, you're fighting so hard to get engagement. And here it's like, it's just a different problem. It's like the engagement is there. And that's amazing. It's like, how do we just listen to our customers now and make sure that we can keep improving it? Yes, I have seen so much engagement on social media. And it's wonderful. Like we don't have a shortage of customers reaching out and giving us feedback or wanting to just parade it around. It's really cool. Is there anything from this is your first birthday week still? And I know that there was a lot of announcements. What are you excited to build on next? Yeah, I think I kind of started talking about it in all my answers, especially the last one of being able to listen to our customers and take that feedback and continue to improve things. But for me, what I really, really have enjoyed is seeing building this connective tissue across the whole Cloudflare product suite. One example that stands out to me is the unified observability launch on Friday, where customers for a long time are like, Cloudflare feels like a black box. Like every time you launch a product, there's a new way to monitor it. There's a new way to like, engage with it. How do you pull the data for it? Like, there's just all these different pieces. And that team did an amazing job to bring together all the ways that our customers observe their products and monitor them and debug them and made it this unified platform, why it's called unified observability. But if you kind of zoom out and take that approach and talk about like, how do we do that for everything? Like, how do we make workers feel like it's part of observability and registrar as part of workers and Cloudflare one as part of everything else like that? There's so much value and you see our customers respond so well to it, that I think more and more we're moving in that direction. And I could point to every single day and find an announcement that is a testament to kind of that mentality. CFCLI as an example, it's like, hey, you could use any of our product suites from our single CLI. And being able to double down on that, being building a connective story across all our products and make everything feel like it's coming from one brain really, is going to make the customer experience and developer experience so much better. So I'm really excited to be doing that. And we can't do that without listening to our customers, whether those are individual developers on a free plan or our largest enterprise customers. This is truly one of those companies that listen to all of the voices. We don't just design for a single person. Yeah, it's really amazing to see how many different customers and types of customers we have. And just what you said earlier about developers and then building out maybe a community that's non -developers, because more and more people are using Cloudflare products. Do you have any kind of main takeaways of how people can follow along with what happened at birthday week or anything that you would want to kind of share about your first birthday week? The easiest place to follow along as always is our blog. So blog .Cloudflare.com. And like I mentioned at the very beginning, we're probably going to have larger as large announcements this week as we did last week, because that's just the culture that we have here, which is really always exciting. And there is a birthday week specific page that could be followed along if you're ever looking for what was announced this week. So Cloudflare.com slash birthday week or slash birthday dash week. I'm sure we'll put the link somewhere. But the nice thing about that is that will stay the website for future birthday weeks as well. And just wanted to mention that this could not be possible with all the different birthday week is not just the co-leads of birthday week, which we didn't mention at the beginning, but is myself and Megan Gamache, who is the director of product management for developer platform. And and there's many, many other people that I it would take too long to mention, but from reviewing blogs to staging the blogs to getting legal consent to open sourcing all these items, I mean, it truly, truly takes an entire team and organization to do what we do every week, but especially birthday week. So just wanted to make sure that we mentioned that there was a lot of other people involved in this. Shout out for the designs to designs. Yeah, the the product manager, there are the PMO and technical PMs and all the people who help on that side as well. Transcribed by https://otter.ai