Happy new year to everyone!
I started the new year with a deep dive into DevRel-Metrics. If you want to check out all the sources I used, check out the links at the end of the post.
DevRel Metrics - North Stars and Keystones
DevRel metrics are the thing everybody struggles with in our profession. One part of the problem is, that not every company is the same. What is an accepted metric at one place might not be in another company!
So to start with I set myself the goal to get a solid grip for the basics and use the things that I think will help me to show value and see which initiatives drive the most impact.
North Star / Keystone
Other people can explain it better than me ;-)
Sean Falconer defines it as a single measurement predictive of your company’s or product’s long-term success. And it should somehow map to the overall company goals.
Tera Viago says that a North Star Metric is your company metric. And “In the end it is all about money and customer satisfaction”!
So my goal was to tie all my metrics to the company metrics somehow. This basically means you should try to attach a monetary value to them. I know, I know we DevRel do not want to do this. But you have to measure something management understands and if anybody can communicate to many different audiences, we are the ones!
What Should we Measure Anyway
After research was done (took me 20 hours) I settled on the Keystone Framework from Kim Maida. It resonated the most with me.
Basically you have four areas you measure:
- Reach
- Awareness
- Engagement
- DevRel Qualified Leads
I added two more categories:
- Internal Impact (For DX Audits and Product Feedback)
- Direct Impact (When DevRel Content directly leads to an improvement in the North Star metric)
I am in the process of writing a lengthy blog post about it. In there will also be my thinking on how OKRs fit with all of this. Also your company stage plays a role in what is important to measure.
Where to Measure?
With all the metrics ready to be measured I had to find out where to measure them.
Unfortunately there seems to be no tool, that captures all the metrics. So for now I have to check three tools to get everything :-/
But meanwhile I got to play around with Orbit. It is a community growth platform. It already fell in love with it as it gives you so much information about your community out of the box.
Links
- Sean Falconer: https://thefalc.com/2020/12/devrel-metrics-and-why-they-matter/
- Tera Viago: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=KXGXfbQfrrI&ab_channel=DevRel
- Measuring DevRel by swix: https://www.swyx.io/measuring-devrel
- DevRel Qualified Leads: https://www.marythengvall.com/blog/2019/12/14/devrel-qualified-leads-repurposing-a-common-business-metrics-to-prove-value
- Internal Impact: https://theworst.dev/developer-advocates-guide-to-addressing-product-friction
- https://theworst.dev/developer-advocates-guide-to-metrics-and-reporting
- The Keystone Framework: https://maida.kim/how-to-measure-the-value-of-developer-relations
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