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.

Summary:

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.

Last updated 2 years ago