Colin McCrone

Summary

I built the initial customer base for a low-code visual scripting app for Building Information Modeling (BIM), playing a key role growing Dynamo from a beta app to its current status as an industry standard tool in Architecture.

• Grew usage from 0 to 25,000 MAUs
• Grew Twitter account to 2,345 followers
• Fostered 25 user-led user groups around the world
• Protected Revit’s relevance in the Japanese market
• Dynamo became an industry standard tool in Architecture and Engineering

My Role

As the technical evangelist for Dynamo, I owned building the customer base, I was a subject matter expert for the dev team, and I was the chief educator for new users.

• Taught ~70 onsite workshops
• Wrote 26 blog posts
• Consulted for 3 high-profile architectural projects
• Presented at 9 conferences and 6 universities
• Gathered product requirements for 5 major features
• Wrote 421 user stories and development tasks
• Launched the website (dynamoBIM.org)
• Launched product documentation (Dynamo Primer)

Introducing Dynamo through public talks and workshops often had the side effect of increasing the perceived value of Autodesk’s portfolio offerings.

“I’d like to convey what a great job Colin has done in exciting and inspiring our customers. The net of Colin’s visit is:

1. We have created some separation from Graphisoft
2. We have sown the seed to have a handful of evangelists for Dynamo in Japan
3. We have shown that we are a young and dynamic company
4. We started to win back hearts and minds of customers that became disenchanted”

– Gary Wyatt, Dir. of Building Design Strategy, Autodesk

Adoption Strategy

Dynamo’s primary purpose is to help bridge a gap in traditional architectural design workflows where conceptual geometry is developed into proper building components. This workflow gap divides software tools and personas alike, with Computational Designers upstream and BIM Managers downstream. When Dynamo was launched, few architects had broad enough technical skills to use Dynamo effectively.

	Computational Designer	BIM Manager
Job	Finds conceptual, rules-based solutions for a project’s design requirements	Models buildings in high detail and maintains model quality standards
Design stage	Early	Middle – Late
Works on projects	Occasionally	Daily
Population	Few, 1-2/firm	Numerous, 1/project
Writes scripts	✅	❌
Uses BIM (Revit)	❌	✅
Value of Dynamo	Improve data interoperability	Custom workflow automation
Adoption strategy	• Cooperate with incumbent software • Defeat skepticism	• Show quick wins • Lower the barrier to entry for scripting
Prospective usage	Potential early adopter	🎯 Target user

To build a user base for Dynamo, we needed technical skills to cross-pollinate between the two personas, so we taught BIM Managers how to write algorithms.

Adoption hypotheses:

• BIM Managers have the greatest potential value to gain from using Dynamo, and they will be willing to learn new technical skills to be able to customize their own workflows.
• Computational Designers would use Dynamo if it improved data interoperability between their preferred geometric CAD tools and Revit.
• Dynamo could provide value by working alongside incumbent conceptual and parametric design tools without needing to fully replace them.

Teaching New Users

Dynamo’s target user personas are smart, irreverent, visually-oriented, and don’t have much spare time. To earn their attention, learning content needed to be clever, prioritize graphics over text, and tie back to useful examples as often as possible.

Selected educational blog posts:

      Geometry 101
      What Does var[]..[] Mean?
      Math Transit

I taught programming concepts visually.

As the Dynamo user base grew, we saw a trend toward informal knowledge transfer, where early adopters taught their colleagues about Dynamo. To support these teachers—to train the trainer—I distilled my hard-won knowledge for how to teach Dynamo, and I shared it in an influential blog post.

Product Documentation

Beyond educational material, I also managed the formal product documentation for Dynamo, including outlining content, managing contractors to write sections, and maintaining the resource after it launched.

User Groups

Dynamo has had an incredibly vibrant community of users from the very start, and it is still cited, in 2024, as a best-in-class example for a product-oriented community at Autodesk.

Throughout my time as an evangelist, I took care to amplify the voices of influential early adopters and to support their own product evangelism. After a few user-led groups got started, I wrote a blog post about their early success and gave advice to other would-be group leaders. With that inspiration and support, dozens more groups were formed and met in cities around the globe.

Much of the credit for Dynamo’s community belongs to the early Dynamo team who helped establish its culture. When the environment supports it, cooperation is infectious and rewarding.