Developer relations involves engaging with developers through evangelism, content creation, generating leads, representing the brand, working with partners, and gathering feedback.
The value of developer relations is driving awareness of a product or platform and facilitating two-way engagement between developers and companies.
Developer relations roles may involve public speaking, writing content, managing community platforms, facilitating partnerships, and ensuring good onboarding experiences.
Ideal developer relations professionals understand developer culture, are technical, can tell compelling stories, communicate across mediums, and actively solve problems.
Developer relations can report into marketing, engineering, or other departments, depending on the organization's structure and leadership. The key is that whoever they report to understands the developer relations role
(00:00) so developer relations what is it how does it work and why on earth should you care well let's dig in [Music] [Applause] alrighty welcome i hope you're safe and well wherever you may be so today i'm going to be talking about a very important demographic of people that it seems like everybody wants to talk to and that is developers okay now before i get into what devrel is all about and how it works i want to talk about why people are interested in talking to developers and there's basically three
(00:33) main reasons okay one two three so the first one is the business of doing business more and more companies are becoming software companies okay they're they're delivering software and services to their team members that they need to do their business but also they're creating services that are on the cloud or the creating mobile app so increasingly companies are hiring technical staff to come in and build out these technical services and therefore companies want to sell their products and services to those
(01:00) technical people okay the second reason why developers are important is influence okay and that is that um in the old days you know people would use cios and ctos to primarily make decisions about technology a technology but these days what happens is companies are hiring developers and these developers are going to meet up some virtual events and reading hacking news and reading technical websites and they're coming to work and saying hey i've just tried using this really cool tool and i think we should use it for the
(01:29) company and that's carrying a lot of weight because they've got the technical kudos to kind of back it up okay so that's another reason why developers report but also developers are kind of a bucket okay and what i mean by this is that when we talk about developers and developer relations we're not typically just talking about for example front end developers who write code that powers the front end of a website or back end developers who are writing code that powers the back end of a website but we're also
(01:55) talking about data scientists and ar developers and vr developers and we're talking about devops and devsecops and all of these different kind of sub categories okay and developer relations staff usually focus on having conversations with those technical audiences but this provides a little bit of a dilemma my friend and that is around this and i've got the suitably red pen around marketing okay surely the marketing people should be doing all of this stuff right the marketing people the experts when it
(02:27) comes to talking to the market right well part of the reason why devrel has kind of sprung up is because there's a perception out there that you can't really market towards developers and that the typical tools of marketing such as email nurture and paid advertising and newsletters and things such as that don't really work with developers well i call on that viewpoint because those tools and techniques absolutely do work with developers however the critical point here is that you need to speak to developers
(02:55) like developers if you start using all of your marketing buzzwords and lingo it's going to fall on pretty flat ears okay okay so that's one of the reasons why marketing historically has struggled in engaging with developers and why developer relations as a separate entity has kind of sprung up okay so what i want to do first of all is clean up my mess here and in this video what i want to cover are three main elements of how devrel works so you can figure out how it's gonna work for you okay so um the first thing we're gonna cover is the
(03:28) value okay what is the value that devrel brings to the world the second is going to be what on earth do they do and then the third is what are the skills oops getting ahead of myself what are the skills that devrel people should bring to the table so value what do they do and what are the skills that they bring okay so let's first of all talk about the value now there's two primary buckets of value that devrel primary brings to the table and the first one is awareness okay that's an e um you know devrel people do
(04:04) a great job of going out there and banging the drum and getting people excited about a particular developer platform so let's say um this is a database we want developers to start using this database okay well devrel people will go and speak at conferences and virtual events they'll create content they'll go on podcasts they'll go on youtube channels they'll be doing a lot of social media and they won't just do a lot of the outreach but they'll also be engaging and responding and having building a relationship around
(04:28) you know that value proposition of that database with that developer audience and that kind of leads to the second point which is engagement okay you know with traditional marketing um it's very broadcast in nature right you create an ad and put it on facebook and that broadcasts out to the people on facebook and hopefully people on facebook will click on the ad and go and check out what you what you're advertising or you create a social media message a lot of marketers will just put it out on social media or you'll do a webinar
(04:56) you'll just present to an audience well the key differentiated with developer relations is that there needs to be a response to that motion okay so if i'm a devrel person and i go and do a talk at a conference then people come and speak to me after the talk then i'll follow up with them i'll engage with them maybe get their email address follow up and send them some documentation or some technical samples but there's a two-way process that's involved in that and that's what people want right nobody wants to just be
(05:20) broadcasting it's one of the reasons why broadcast television has been dying in recent years and why people are getting their content and material from places like youtube okay it's because people want that two-way relationship with creators and therefore developers want a two-way relationship with the companies that they're engaging with okay so awareness and engagement is what the value is all about now in terms of what devrel people actually primarily do i'm gonna break this down into eight i'm just wanna double check
(05:48) my notes two three four five six seven eight okay there's kind of eight key pieces of value but not all devrel people do this the second the seventh seventh and the eighth are what i feel like they should be doing which i want to get to because i think it's really important okay now the first thing that they tend to do is evangelism okay so they get out there and they generate this awareness okay and this in itself is a huge skill right been a great speaker a great writer and getting out there and really
(06:23) weaving a narrative in a story around this database for example or this technology that you're out there promoting okay not everybody's good at this not everybody can do this very well okay it requires a certain kind of personality and a certain set of schools to do that and there are some amazing devrel people out there who do this i mean like any profession there's also some pretty terrible people out there who do it as well okay but fundamentally they get out there and they're personable people who
(06:46) can deliver a personal message to an audience and get some kind of traction okay now this is one of the reasons why in many cases developer relations will also be known as developer evangelism okay or community evangelism or community advocacy for example is that it varies on title but fundamentally that's probably one of the most critical elements of what developer relations folks do all right now the second piece which is kind of tightly integrated here is content okay and that is that they'll typically generate a whole bunch of
(07:13) content as well so this is going to be blogging podcasting youtube there's often a lot of live streaming done by devrel folks there'll be social media content generated there may be in infographics and things like that um and generally when people are looking for devrel folks they're looking for a mixture of evangelism and content now some companies especially larger companies will split this and they'll have dedicated content creation staff and they'll have dedicated evangelism stuff but most smaller
(07:39) companies are actually looking for you know i might keep them falling down most smaller companies are looking for somebody to have both ideally in their skill set all right now the third piece here that they that they focus on is leads now this is really important right when we think of leads in a marketing sense typically that's bringing people into your universe handing them over to the sales team and then the sales team close those leads and that's how the sale is made however in devrel typically leads are people who are
(08:09) attending webinars people who are downloading the free version of your product people who are using your open source project okay it's not necessarily sales leads in fact in most cases it's not sales leads okay so you've got to be very careful especially if you're a company and you're hiring devrel folks to not conflate leads from a marketing group and leads from a develo group because they are very very different if you treat your devrel leads like you treat your marketing leads you're going to start frustrating a
(08:35) bunch of developers because no developer wants to get into a sales funnel okay that's just not the culture of how developers tend to operate okay so leads is basically trackable interest in something that you're doing people who register for a webinar people who download your open source project and use it people who go to your events people who attend your meetups people who join your forum for example all right now the fourth piece here is around brand okay a lot of devrel people will be really focused on not just
(09:04) performing the evangelism and getting content out there and generating leads and interests but they'll be kind of arbiters for the brand okay and brand isn't just logos and colors and stuff like that sure that's one part of it and devrel people will often you know have input on kind of the logo design and the visual aesthetic of a community or a visual aesthetic of a product but brand is tonality it's style it's it's it's it's how classy you are in how you engage with people it's how creative
(09:30) and interesting you are and that's all about brand and that kind of ties quite neatly into the visual brand but also the tonality and the kind of the voice of of the project okay devrel people are are examples of that if you've got a great developed person goes and they do a presentation at the conference and not only is the content interesting and it's technically relevant and it solves a real problem but they deliver it in a way that's funny and dynamic but respectful and collaborative that all reflects
(09:58) really well on your brand but if you get somebody who's not good at that well be careful that's all i'm gonna say all right now the other one here is partners okay some def i'm gonna cover this slightly i'm gonna be quick about this because this is not a huge chunk of devrel for most developed people that i know but it certainly is a piece of this where um you know if you're out there as a developer person you're doing your evangelism the content and the leads and and working with you know generating
(10:22) this kind of brand perspective people are going to come come up to you and say hey could we partner on a webinar a partner or an event or could we partner on a piece of content or something along those lines or if you have a company that you're doing business with you might want to partner with as well so a lot of devrel people will be intimately involved in that partnership okay but bear in mind that this is different to commercial partners okay the strategic partners that's a whole different kettle of fish
(10:46) all right and then the final one in terms of the core pieces here is feedback okay your devrel folks or if you're a devrel person are going to be really involved in getting amazing feedback from developers okay invariably your devrel folks anyone who's worth their salt is going to be very involved in not just raising awareness and the evangelism around around your technology but also hearing what the ex what the response was and hearing what the developer thought of it and what their feedback was and then
(11:15) channeling that feedback back into the engineering team into the product team to the executive team to the marketing group okay devrel people are a sponge for this kind of feedback and part the skill of a good developed person is taking a lot of feedback from a lot of different places condensing it down into a set of useful bits of information that can communicate effectively to the team and doing it in a way that's really thoughtful and sensitive right because sometimes developers are going to use your technology
(11:41) and they're gonna say it sucks okay and just going into the company and saying they all think it sucks that's not a constructive conversation so devrel people sometimes have to be a little bit political in how they kind of couch that feedback and communicate it in the most constructive and effective way back into the company all right so just to recap at this point develop devrel people generate a lot of awareness they engage with an audience in kind of an interactive manner in terms of what they do they perform
(12:06) evangelism they generate content they generate leads but again not the same as marketing leads they go out and represent the brand they work with partners um that looks like partners that's a petite um and they bring in feedback okay but there's two things that not all devrel people do that they absolutely should be doing and this is really really important okay the seventh piece here is onboarding [Music] one of my pet peeves is when companies go and do a whole load of evangelism and create loads of content
(12:39) and make a big noise about a really cool piece of technology people love it and then they come in and they you know a warm lead comes in to start using your product for the first time and then the onboarding sucks it's too difficult to kind of get up and running the documentation is terrible there's no decent api docs um there's no getting started guide there's no place for them to go and you know get help and answer questions it's just a nightmare to get up and running now the pr tricky thing is that often
(13:06) that developer experience in terms of the onboarding piece isn't really owned by certain teams in a company right sometimes the engineering team uh and not necessarily owning that sometimes the product team is not owning that because sometimes it's part of a community experience your devrel people should be your eyes and ears when it comes to um ensuring that that onboarding experience is great because when they get that feedback from developers and they say your documentation sucks or there's no place where i can go and ask questions
(13:32) that should then feed back into the company and optimize the onboarding experience okay so this is really important okay if i was hiring a devrel person i'd be asking them about that right out the gate how do you approach making sure that people get on board as quickly as easy as possible and then the eighth one here and the final one in terms of what they do should be community okay um there are some devrel people who love doing the evangelism and love doing the generating the content and getting out the road and doing social media and
(14:03) being in the limelight but then they don't do enough of the engagement they don't participate in the community they don't go into slack into the forum they're not answering tickets they're not um reaching back out to people once they've met up with them and had a good experience talking about the talking about the technology okay the community piece is critical if you don't have that then you're going to struggle to build that authentic devrel experience okay so it can't just be about content it can't
(14:27) just be about speaking it can't just be about performing it's got to be the conversation too is really really important okay all right so this is what we've defined the value we've defined what they do now if you are a devrel wannabe you want to get into devrel or if there's a company who's looking to hire devrel people i'm going to tell you what i always recommend to companies in terms of what skills they should be looking for okay and we've got five here that i want to cover okay four
(14:55) five okay the first is uh to check my notes again is that they understand the culture okay the culture of what a developer audience wants okay now i'm going to conquer a myth that some people think about devrel you don't have to be a developer to work in devrel and to be really good at devrel okay you need to understand the culture of developers and what they want and how they operate okay um and understanding that developers write code is not enough you need to understand kind of the what developers are passionate about
(15:31) like for example developers love writing code and they love seeing the impact of their code running and they love engaging in really authentic elegant technical solutions and develop most developers that i've ever met they don't like a lot of the stuff that wraps around that they don't enjoy testing they don't enjoy writing documentation they don't enjoy jumping through hoops when it comes to approvals they don't necessarily enjoy dealing with the minutiae of what the design team wants and how that integrates with
(15:57) the with the product team a lot of developers don't particularly enjoy certain project management methodologies such as agile developers really love writing code they enjoy technical problem solving they enjoy meeting and spending time with other developers and solving interesting technical problems they enjoy certain art forms and culture and media and all kinds of different things so understanding that culture is important if you're interested in getting into devrel then go and spend time in a developer community you can just go and
(16:23) loiter you know in an online forum and just watch the conversation look watch what people are interested in what watch what their the challenges are what they struggle with that's really important okay now although you don't need to be a developer you do need to be technical okay and i don't necessarily mean that you're writing assembly code and building operating system kernels okay but you need to understand the technology that you're dealing with okay if you're in devrel and you're just talking about the value
(16:53) proposition of a piece of software that will get you so far but at some point a developer is gonna ask you a technical question and ideally you're gonna be in a position where you can at least be able to understand the question give them some kind of answer and then point them in the direction of somebody who may be able to go in more depth okay so you don't need to understand the developer frameworks and all that level of detail but you need to understand the purpose of the technology what it solves what value it
(17:16) brings what pain points it solves what roadblocks it's solving all of those different pieces it's important to know the the lingo the jargon the frameworks the issues the challenges that developers are facing that is really really important the good news is that there's so much information on the internet how to do this that you can go and learn okay now three and this is really important okay is that you need to be a good storyteller okay you need to be able to weave a narrative going out there and
(17:45) talking about this is our database and these are the features in our database and our features in our database are better than the features in that other crappy database okay it's not going to cut it people don't want to hear spec sheets people don't want to hear lists of features and one of the big misnomers that some people have with developers is developers are technical people therefore they just want the technical details shared directly with them that's okay i can guarantee you that developers
(18:12) are as receptive to stories as anybody else don't just talk about the value proposition for you for your for your uh your project talk about what problem it solves the impact that it's had on other people who've used it weave a story around it tell a story about an individual or a company or a use case where people can really understand and feel it and incorporate tension into that story as well this is so so important okay i don't believe you can do devrel effectively if you can't tell stories okay
(18:39) now you don't have to be you know stephen king okay you just need to be able to say here's a narrative a linear narrative that you weave into your your content into your evangelism the very best of all people do that extremely well and this is a skill that you you constantly learn and improve with over time okay all right now the other piece here uh so uh number four is being a good communicator okay now this is usually going to require a fairly decent level of communication across different mediums okay it's going
(19:14) to be your evangelism is invariably going to be a good public speaker someone who can get up in front of an audience and speak effectively and engagingly and not just read bullet points of a slide but it's also going to be a good writer somebody can create blog posts someone who can create good um social media messages somebody can create good emails uh someone who can respond elegantly on a forum or on slack and places like that so you've got to be a good communicator and you can see that all of these are
(19:36) kind of weave together right a good communicator will tell good stories the stories will be technical in nature the technical stories will be familiar with the norms of the culture of developers okay so this is all part of just being generally a good elegant communicator outward in terms of engaging with the developer audience and then the final one here is to be a problem solver and again i think this is a nuance that there are some develop people i've worked with in my career where they'll be able to go out there
(20:06) and tell a great story and talk about all the amazing benefits of using this particular tool and how it can solve your problems how it's easy to use and the company gets you and your culture and all the rest of it and all these things are great but often some of those folks talk at a bit of an abstract level they're not talking about real problems and how you solve real problems the very best dev role people i've ever worked with uh go out and they do a talk about something other create a piece of
(20:30) content someone responds and says hey i've got this specific issue that i'm trying to figure out how to solve will your technology solve it the devrel people person will follow up and not just say sure absolutely but they'll point some some documentation or some some existing sample code or something along those lines or they'll actually put together a short video on something such as loom where they kind of walk through exactly how to do it but they'll fundamentally get them to solving that problem and
(20:57) this is really important for one particular reason is if you want to build a great audience what people want a quick wins okay they want somebody to be able to give them some information and to help them to solve their problem as quickly as possible i'm wondering whether you are watching this video because you're like i don't really 100 know what devrel is and where it fits into my world and my hope is that all of this is now helping to solve your problem it's helping to illuminate what wasn't illuminated before you watch
(21:22) the video and we want to do the same thing with deborah's to make sure that those people are actively solving those problems and then that's going to help those developers build a good relationship with you okay now one final point i just want to touch on is where do they report okay there's been a tension in the world uh in the industry about whether devrel people were pointing to marketing or into engineering some devrel people really don't don't want to report into marketing i think that's kind of a little unfair
(21:48) okay if you've got a good marketing lead who understands developers and understands developer culture reporting into marketing is no problem in some companies they're report directly into engineering and that can work well as well so long as that engineering team understands the role of devrel so it really depends on the understanding of the person that person's reporting into this is a whole separate video that i'm probably going to put something out about to get to dig into but i just wanted to
(22:12) cover that briefly before i wrapped up all right so if that was useful be sure to hit that like button because i like the like button you should like the like button and when you like the like button then my videos get recommended to people and i quite like that all right also be sure to hit that subscribe button and of course that little notification bell to get notified of when new videos come out and i will see you in the next one peace out [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] you
