What Does Developer Relations Do?

Developer relations is a very broad term. Companies name the roles differently. By developer relations, I mean anyone that works directly with the developers and acts as a bridge between the platform and the developers, that includes developer evangelists, developer advocates, SDK engineers, tech writers, community managers, and developer marketers.

As mentioned before, developer relations bridge the gap between the platform and the developer that uses the platform by any means necessary. A typical developer relations team will ideally.

1. Enable developers through self-serve materials like documentation, tutorials, videos and sample code snippets, and sample apps, A.K.A Developer Enablement.
2. Engage developers through events, meetups, webinars, and the developer community, anything to keep the developer engaged with the platform. make them feel that they made the right choice by building a solution with you, A.K.A Developer Engagement
3. Support developers through traditional support channels like support tickets, troubleshooting calls, and other forms of assistance specific to those customers/developers. (it's ideal for keeping the support part very minimal as a Devrel for a reason discussed later in the series) A.K.A Developer Support.
4. Build tools apart from sample apps to make it easy for developers to use the platform features, such as client SDKs and CLIs. A.K.A Developer Tooling
5. Advocate for the developers, be a voice for the developers within the platform/company, interact with developers frequently, collect feedback, pass the feedback to the engineering team to improve the product/platform A.K.A Developer Advocacy
6. Evangelize products/features, drive adoption for existing product/feature, bring a new product to the wider developer audience by running Early Access Programs or closed beta programs. A.K.A Developer/Product Evangelism

I'll also try to explain each of the above items to the best of my knowledge in individual parts of their own later in the series.

Now that we have some idea of what Devrels do let's talk about the types of developers we cater to as Devrels in a B2B SaaS ecosystem in the next part.