Meet Mary Thengvall, Director of Developer Relations at Camunda

At Camunda, we are very intentional with how we build our culture, because we know our people and our culture are central to everything we do. It’s what makes us who we are and fuels our creativity and productivity. 

In this “Meet a Camundi” series, we’ll be introducing you to some of the people who help make Camunda an amazing place to work (and an amazing product to use). We hope that sharing these stories with you will help give you a sense of how we do things here and what it means to be a Camundi.

Discover Mary’s remarkable career journey

Mary leads an amazing team that has an incredibly important role at Camunda—and that’s helping to support and grow our fantastic community. If you’ve been on our forums or at any CamundaCon, you’ve almost certainly seen her or a member of her team helping out, answering questions, and sharing knowledge.

Her story is one of growing, changing, learning, and succeeding that many may relate to. Read on to delve deeper into her inspiring journey!

Questions

What is your name and your role at Camunda?

Mary Thengvall, Director of Developer Relations.

What experiences have shaped your career and led you to where you are today?

I have a passion for telling stories and graduated from university with the intent to be a journalist, but entered the job market right when newspapers were laying off their writing staff due to the new trend of blogging. I turned to public relations instead, writing press releases for O’Reilly Media, a tech publishing company. While learning more about tech topics, I started asking questions about our consumers—how did we know what content they were interested in? Were we sure the content we were creating was truly meeting their needs? This curiosity led me to ask more questions, turning to our conference attendees and readers to find out what topics they were most interested in and how we could best help them. This provided a natural progression to community management, and then developer relations, where my goal is to meet our customers’ needs and enable them to have the best possible experience with our product.

How did you learn about Camunda, and what motivated you to join the team?

I first engaged with Camunda as a contractor when I was running my own Developer Relations consulting business. They were in the process of building out a Developer Relations team. While working with them to establish a foundation for the function, I learned just how important the community is to the company and how committed they are to providing high-quality solutions that meet their needs. When the opportunity was presented to join the team and run the Developer Relations function, I couldn’t turn it down!

What excites you the most about your work?

As I mentioned, I love storytelling—it’s what drew me to journalism! Being able to tell our community’s stories—sharing feedback, highlighting their successes, encouraging their progress, and more—is a great way for me to continue that storytelling passion in my day-to-day work.

As a fully remote company, Camunda has spent a lot of care creating an intentional remote culture, but “remote culture” can mean a lot of things. What does the remote culture of Camunda mean to you?

I’ve been a full-time remote employee for the past 12 years at various companies, but Camunda by far handles remote work the best. We emphasize asynchronous work with strategic in-person gatherings, balancing the team-building benefits of in-person work with the practical needs of remote work. One piece I really appreciate is the flexibility of our working hours. It allows us to take care of ourselves (physically, mentally, etc.) while also getting our work done in a manner that works best for us.

One of the more powerful aspects of process orchestration is how broadly it can be applied to deliver value for organizations. Is there a specific capability or use case that you’ve seen in your work that you think is really cool?

I love the variety of use cases that our community finds for process orchestration. From distributing access to proper tooling for new students to processing photos taken by the Perseverance Rover (whose mission is still ongoing!), there are so many ways where process orchestration can streamline the work that needs to be done.

What is a project or idea you’ve worked on at Camunda that you’re particularly proud of?

There’s so much to be proud of! We’ve made incredible progress over the past 5 years since the team was established. We recently published a blogpost highlighting the programs and platforms (such as our highly active forum and local meetups) that we’ve created for our community in hopes of improving their experience with our product and process orchestration as a whole.

Can you share something about your personal life that colleagues might not know about you?

In my spare time, I co-lead a Burning Man camp of approximately 100 individuals. The artwork created every year and the community of people we’ve brought together are incredibly special. My nickname is “Spreadsheets” due to the amount of organization and documentation I’ve brought to the group! Having everything organized (a place for everything and everything in its place) makes me very happy. 😅

Do you have any tips for others in your role that are looking to get started or grow their careers?

Developer Relations is a mix of communication, development, and generating excitement about concepts and solutions. If you’re currently a developer, I’d highly recommend looking into local events (conferences or meet-ups) to see if there’s an opportunity for you to give a casual talk about an interesting technical topic, or creating a tutorial blogpost or video to share with others who might be looking for a similar solution. These activities allow you to “test the waters” and see whether Developer Relations is something you’re interested in pursuing full-time.

If you’re not as technical (I call it “tech-savvy”), a good next step is to look for connections you can make between individuals in your industry. Do you know two people who are interested in similar topics? Introduce them and watch the connection grow! You don’t have to have all the answers, but knowing who to connect people with and what opportunities exist for people within your network is an important part of being a community manager.

Learn more about careers at Camunda

We want to thank Mary for sharing her story, and we hope you found it as interesting and valuable as we did!

Stay tuned for more stories from our incredible team members in the “Meet a Camundi” series. Camunda is growing fast and on a mission to find the very best talent in the world. Check out our careers page and jobs page, and join us to impact the future of Process Orchestration with Camunda!