You might have encountered Developer Relations or DevRel without even realizing it.
Maybe you watched someone speak at a conference, followed a company because of its technical content, attended a developer meetup, used a well-written API guide, or asked a question in a developer community.
These might seem like different activities, but they can all be part of Developer Relations.
So, what exactly is DevRel, and what does it involve?
To give this introduction, I’ll be following this guide:
- What Is Developer Relations?
- What Activities Are Involved in DevRel?
- What Skills Does DevRel Require?
- What Jobs Are There in DevRel?
- Is DevRel Just Marketing?
What Is Developer Relations?
Developer Relations is the practice of building a two-way relationship between a company and the developers who use its tools or products. These companies are mostly developer-focused or build products and tools for developers. Companies like Postman, GitHub, and more. DevRel connects a company with its developer community.
Simply:
Company ↔ DevRel ↔ Developers
DevRel brings together several activities, including advocacy, content and education, community, feedback, and support. It also works in both directions.
Both directions, in the sense that a company teaches developers how to use its product, but developers also teach the company what is working, what is confusing, what is missing, and what could be better. The purpose is to help developers succeed and feed that learning back into the product.
Imagine a company has built an excellent API. The API works well, but the documentation is confusing. There are no useful examples or applications of it. Developers cannot easily find answers when they get stuck, and there is no clear place to ask questions.
The product might be technically excellent, but developers will still struggle to use it. DevRel helps remove these barriers. The DevRel function looks at these problems and asks, “What is stopping this developer from succeeding?”
The goal is to reduce friction and create a faster time-to-first-success for developers. Sometimes the solution is a quick-start guide, a tutorial, a workshop, a community, or even a documentation improvement.
Developer Relations has become an important function for companies building products for developers because simply building a good product is no longer enough. And that is why companies invest in DevRel. Stripe is a good example of the importance of developer experience, particularly through its documentation, examples, and developer-focused approach.
What Activities Are Involved in DevRel?
Most DevRel work can be grouped into a few major areas. But what a DevRel team does depends heavily on the company, its product, and the developers it serves.
Here are some of the areas DevRel involves:
Advocacy
This is about representing both the developers and the product. On one hand, it means speaking up for developers and making sure their needs are represented internally within the company. On the other hand, it means representing and advocating for the company's product or technology to developers.
Developer Advocates represent the developer perspective while also helping developers understand what a product can do and how they can use it. This can mean speaking at conferences, attending meetups, talking to developers, answering questions, or sharing developer experiences with internal teams like engineering and product.
But advocacy is not simply about speaking on behalf of developers or promoting a product. It also means listening.
Content and Education
This involves creating tutorials, documentation, guides, workshops, and other resources that help developers learn.
In order to help developers succeed, content and education are needed. Sometimes the solution is a quick-start guide, a tutorial, a workshop, or a demo.
Quick-start guides help someone get something working in 10 to 15 minutes. Tutorials teach developers how to complete a real task. Sample repositories or demos allow developers to clone, run, and modify working projects.
DevRel content is not content for the sake of having content. It solves a problem. The best content often gets developers to a working result as quickly as possible.
For example, instead of writing a long article explaining how an API works, a developer might benefit more from a small runnable example that authenticates, makes one API call, and displays the response.
Community
This is about creating spaces where developers can connect, share knowledge, and help one another.
A developer community gives people a place to learn, ask questions, share projects, and help one another. Healthy communities require trust, inclusivity, and authenticity. But building a community is more than creating a Discord server or WhatsApp group.
As a community grows, its members can become some of the most valuable sources of product feedback. GitHub is a good example of this.
Feedback and Support
This is about listening to developers and helping them solve problems, understand products, and find workarounds when necessary.
DevRel involves understanding where developers are struggling. That means paying attention to questions from communities, support requests, documentation issues, bug reports, and conversations with developers.
This creates a feedback loop:
Developers → DevRel → Product/Engineering → Developers
DevRel connects short-term support with long-term product improvement. It looks beyond solving a repeated problem for individual developers. For example, if 100 developers are asking the same question, that is a problem beyond 100 developers needing individual support. Perhaps the documentation needs to change.
What Skills Does DevRel Require?
DevRel sits at the intersection of technology, communication, and community. That means the skill set is quite broad.
Technical Skills
A DevRel professional working with technical products needs enough technical knowledge to understand the product and help developers use it. That is why most professionals in Developer Relations have a software engineering background or are technically inclined.
The required depth will vary by role. A Developer Advocate working with an API may need strong programming skills, while a Community Manager may have a different technical focus.
Communication Skills
Knowing technology is not enough. DevRel professionals need to communicate that technology clearly.
That can involve public speaking, teaching, writing, and storytelling. The ability to take something complicated and make it understandable is extremely valuable.
Community and Relationship Skills
DevRel is ultimately about people.
DevRel professionals need to be able to listen, build relationships, understand different perspectives, manage communities, and create environments where people feel comfortable contributing.
And authenticity matters. Developers can usually tell when someone is genuinely trying to help versus when someone is simply trying to sell them something.
What Jobs Are There in DevRel?
DevRel is an umbrella term, and companies use different titles for roles within it. These roles can overlap significantly.
Some common roles include:
Developer Advocate: Developer Advocates work closely with developers and often focus on technical education, content, speaking, demos, community engagement, and advocacy.
Developer Relations Engineer: This role usually has a stronger engineering focus. A DevRel Engineer may build demos, create sample applications, work with APIs and SDKs, and help developers solve technical problems.
Developer Educator: Developer Educators focus heavily on teaching. They may create courses, tutorials, documentation, workshops, and other educational resources.
Community Manager: Community Managers focus on creating and maintaining healthy developer communities. They may organize events, manage online communities, support community members, and develop programmes that encourage participation.
Technical Writer: Technical Writers create documentation and other technical content that help developers understand and use a product.
Developer Experience Engineer: Developer Experience, or DevEx, focuses on making the experience of building with a product as smooth as possible. This can involve onboarding, tooling, documentation, SDKs, error messages, and developer workflows.
At a smaller company, one person might handle advocacy, content, community, and technical education. At a larger company, these responsibilities may be distributed across an entire DevRel organization.
Is DevRel Just Marketing?
No. There is a lot of misunderstanding around DevRel and marketing. Developer Relations may sit under the marketing department in some companies. There is definitely an overlap between DevRel and marketing, but they are not the same thing.
Marketing generally focuses on communicating the value of a product and encouraging people to consider or purchase it.
DevRel has a different relationship with its audience. It connects a company with its developer community, turning traditional one-way marketing into an active, two-way dialogue.
Marketing promotes. DevRel helps and listens.
Developers can sense the difference. If a company only shows up in a developer community whenever it has a new product to promote, people will notice.
DevRel does involve posting on social media, organizing events, writing blog posts, and giving conference talks. But beyond these activities, there is the steady process of supporting developers, building trust, understanding their problems, and improving the product based on what is learned.
At its core, Developer Relations is about building a strong relationship between a company and its developer community.
It combines advocacy, content and education, community, feedback, and support to help developers understand and successfully use a product while helping companies better understand their developers.
DevRel is not just about talking to developers. It is about building with them, learning from them, and helping them succeed.
I hope this gave you an understanding of what Developer Relations is, what it involves, and why it matters. If you have any questions or thoughts about DevRel, feel free to leave them in the comments.
Top comments (2)
This was really enlightening especially as someone who doesn't want to remain in the building/coding part of SWE forever, articles like this really shows the endless possibilities in tech.
Thank you! Glad you found it helpful.