How to scale a developer relations team
Google’s Uttam Tripathi shares practical advice on how to scale a developer relations team to meet your programme’s growing needs.
Video
- Principles for building developer programs and strategy.
- Feedback.
- Community first.
- Diversity and inclusion.
- Four Pillars to scale your DevRel Teams
- Team
- Personas
- Type of Role
- Expanding Globally and Scaling
- Pipeline for DevRel Hires
- Org your DevRel is a part of.
- Outreach
- Know what are developers that are most relevant for you.
- Online channels.
- Influencers and community managers.
- Operations
- Vendor partners as an extended team
- Swag
- Feedback
- If you get unlimited resources and a budget...
- Probably bad news for your company because they’re not being thoughtful about how they are investing and the floodgates are literally open.
- Doesn’t really focus one to innovate as it should be.
- What is really scaling?
- Preparing the ground for the next wave of growth.
- Feedback.
- Dev rel traditionally has been an outward-focus function.
- There needs to be two-way advocacy.
- Need to be able to take the developer feedback and bring it back to the Product & Eng Team.
- Community first.
- If you’re able to do it the majority of the time, that itself is good news.
- Did you have influence in your Product & Eng Teams to block a product launch if you think that launch is not going to be beneficial for your developers?
- If you have strong signals and feedback that the product is not ready, are you able to make that call?
- When you are sharing content for meet-ups or events among your developer community, is that the content that you and your Product & Eng Team want to push out?
- Focusing on the needs of the developer community really helps you win their trust in the long run and that really pays back also in business value.
- Diversity and inclusion.
- Important -- developer community that we’ve worked with and engage are also representative of these developers that we want to eventually engage with.
- What kind of personas exists in the DevRel world?
- What kind of roles exists?
- Developer Advocate is a much more common word being used now.
- Folks who go on stage.
- The ones that go at events.
- At meet-ups and talks.
- Go behind the camera and record talks -- share more scalably
- Public face for your developer programs and your platform.
- Community Manager.
- Very quickly, if your product is starting to get traction, there will be a community that will build around it.
- Folks who are helping swags for meet-ups, helping buy pizza for the hackathon.
- Helping run events if your company has to run those first-party events themselves.
- Other roles -- Developer Program Engineers, Developer Advocates are going and talking about the vision of the platform, getting people excited.
- Specialized roles like Developer Program Engineers exist.
- In many companies, especially if the dev rel team is fairly small, Developer Advocates will be doing the same responsibility.
- Tech Writers.
- Call-to-action.
- Inspiring someone with a key message.
- Experience that that developer website has is key.
- Having a really solid technical writer team is important.
- Dev rel teams typically get started wherever the host organization is based but then very quickly realize.
- The challenge is hiring leaders in these key hubs who can really grow your dev rel presence over there.
- Focusing on hubs.
- Figuring out the demographic that works best for your program and needs.
- Where do we hire for Dev rel?
- Traditional interview formats of either hiring for a software engineer role doesn’t really help.
- LinkedIn
- You look at people with dev rel titles, that pool is growing.
- Software engineers in your company who are keen
- Offer them a rotation opportunity or a short-term project for them to explore dev rel as a practice.
- Hiring some of the community managers from the broader developer community that your org. works with.
- Doesn't matter which organization your dev rel team is part of.
- The obvious ones are marketing.
- Irrespective of where you are, you can be successful if your dev rel organization.
- Use your influence to land your dev rel team where you would be most comfortable with.
- If you strongly think that your dev rel team should be part of marketing, make that pitch early on.
- That number around 20 million has not shifted in the last five years.
- Know what are developers that are most relevant for you.
- Are you really engaging with developers that are relevant for your platform?
- Online channels.
- Events are very expensive, expensive on time, expensive on resources.
- Don’t give you a channel to constantly engage with your developers.
- Explore online channels.
- Helps you get a lot more traction.
- Influencers and community managers.
- Identify key influencers and community leaders in those markets and build relationships with them.
- Reach a lot more developers than a traditional channel will probably offer you.
- Dev rel is a job that requires a lot of travel for example.
- Vendor partners as an extended team
- Are you booking all your travel yourself or is there someone, a vendor or an agency who can help you?
- There are organizations that can help you.
- Swag.
- Procblem when we have swags being produced centrally, not headquarters. And we’re trying to ship it worldwide.
- Way too expensive if your developers are in emerging markets.
- Shipping cost.
- Producing locally.
- Has a positive impact on the environmental footprint.
- A key part of the developer ecosystem, the work that we do is gathering developer feedback.
- This is an area where sometimes it’s okay to not focus on scale.
- Face-to-face conversations where the developers were sharing their pain points.