Quickstart guide to Developer Relations

Introduction

My first encounter with the term “Dev Rel” was on a social platform, Twitter. Talents on this platform share tips, blog posts, and other resources to empower other developers. My offline experience was kind of similar. This was at my first IRL conference, called Unstack Africa, where great speakers were passionate about educating and giving value to technical talents.

You will observe that both my offline and online experiences have the same thing in common, which is educating others. Does that mean that Dev-Rel is about educating others? You will find out in a moment.

DevRel is relatively new, and navigating the space is hard and a bit of a hurdle. As a result, the purpose of this guide is to educate you and provide insights from Dev Rel experts.

What is Developer Relations?

Developer Relations (also called Dev Rel) is a team within an organization that prioritizes building relationships with external developers. It focuses on enabling and empowering developers with the right tools to succeed at using a product or technology.

According to Caroline Lewko, it is the professional practice of engaging with developers as the primary user of a product, generally outside of one’s own company. At this level, DevRel practitioners act as a liaison between the company and the developer community.

This community is usually a group of individuals who have an interest in the same technology or product. Therefore, it is the work of DevRel to keep the flame of interest burning to the end of retaining them.

For example, take Paypal - a payment solution that helps people pay online in a simple and safe way,
sets up a developer relations team to enable developers get the most out of their product suite ranging from APIs and SDKs. You will want to ask what the team will be doing. Let's find out in a moment.

What does the Developer Relations team do?

Educate: As a devrel practitioner you will be investing a lot of time educating your developer community. By doing this, you'll provide all they need to get their job done. Educating your technical audience might take different forms ranging from writing blogpost, Speaking at an event, hosting an online workshop, creating a video content

Teaching is a meta-strength in Devrel. It is a multi-faceted role that requires variety of skills e,g writing, speaking, and creating video contents. One good thing is to realize where your strength lies and gain mastery!

Community Building and Engagement: This involves consistently keeping in touch with your developer community. This is how relationships are built. A devrel practitioner, to the community is a representative of the company and to the company, represents the community. As a result devrel must invest in the success of its community.
Code: Because it's a technical product you are building a community around, devrel practitioners must be able to speak and understand the language the developer community speak to be able to engage and educate them. This simply means they must know how to code because more often they would be involved in building demos, sandboxes, workshops, testing out new features et al.

For example, a dev-rel engineer on the Paypal dev-rel team will need to know how to code. Whether JS, Python, or whatever programming language the SDKs or APIs support.

Who makes up the Developer Relations team?

Developer Relations is an umbrella of things and as a result requires different talents to focus on certian aspects. The following are the roles likely to be reckoned with in Dev Rel

Developer Advocates: They’re often building sample apps, live coding, or giving demos, and engaging with the community on a technical level. They sort of have coding experience.

Technical Ambassadors: They need to be able to carry on conversations within and outside the community or ecosystem. As well as answer questions about the technical aspects of your product. This role may not require coding experience.

Developer Relations Manager: Manages the devrel team, set its strategy and goals. Also makes sure they are not engaging in task relating to other depts such as marketing, sales et all.

Technical Writers: document and write about the product in a clear and simple approach.

How to set yourself up for success

Some of these pointers here are from Tejas Kumar session in DXMentorship class.

Now that you have a glimpse of what devrel is, what they do and the roles involved. You might consider the following if you want to jumpstart your career as a devrel practitioner:

Join Communities: All this is saying is, engage with your local communities. Meaning start by attending events in your local vicinity, help a fellow community member, or even submit a CFP to share your knowledge about your wins and struggles building a feature or product. Examples of communities to join GDG, Web3Bridge(Web3 enthusiast)
Build high quality relationships: To navigate through DevRel as a profession, you need to understand building relationships. This relationship, should not be transactional i.e not because you need help from them but rather because you want to help them.
Offer value to your network: Be valuable to people in your network. This may range from helping talents solve their bugs, helping devs make their first open source contributions, sharing tips and resources that have helped while starting out. This way you are building authenticity and authority to reckon with.
Be open-minded and Data-driven: Treat every reactions and outcome as a data to make a better informed decision in your career.
Keep Upskilling: This is a neccessity in every career as its plays a major factor in one’s relevance in the industry. This is same for DevRel, as the field is relatively new and still growing, as a practitioner you need to upskill to stay abreast of new trends and strategies.

Other things to keep in mind

You cannot measure DevRel: Companies put pressure on the devrel team as to measuring success. The no-brainer here is, the best way to measure devrel is to not measure it. Because your job is to build relationships and this efforts can only be proven overtime.

Do DevRel internally: The members of your team are developers as a result you need to focus on doing devrel internally first. Listen to their needs, liaise with the product or engineering team to organize seminars explaining the technicalities of the product. This will be beneficial to both the community, junior developers or even new hires.

Optimize for what you are naturally gifted with: Because DevRel is a multi-faceted role, one thing to keep in mind whether you are just starting out, or at the first stage of an interview, or already working as a DevRel engineer is to always optimize for what you are naturally gifted with. For example, you might be naturally convenient and proficient with speaking, optimize this strength. The idea is to master this gift and learn others as you go on in your career.

It is DevRel and not DevSell: Dev Rel most of the time intersects with other departments such as marketing, Sales et al. It is important to understand that your responsibility as a devrel practitioner is to build relationships and not sell to developers. Selling is the work of the sales team as the name implies and DevRel is about building relationships as implied in its name.

Conclusion

You must have found out that DevRel is about educating and building high quality relationships with your developer audience. Just like every other field, it is ever growing. You need to keep learning and upskilling to ensure your developer community succeed.

To learn more about this profession here are some resources or communities to check out.
The list is long but this should give you a headstart.
Devrel-resources
DXMentorship
Developer Advocacy Book
Others

if you found this helpful or have any questions, you can drop your comment or reach out to me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading through.