DevRel Weekly - Issue 108 - Can We Successfully Recreate the Hallway Track?

Welcome! 👋

Happy Monday, everybody! I hope your week is off to a great start. This week's newsletter brings us a variety of topics, from creating engaging online events to making sure that each and every one of your community members has a successful onboarding experience, and so much more.

And for those of you hunting for a job right now, there are 170+ links in our collection this week, including two fantastic sponsors: LogRocket and Active Campaign.

As always, if there's content that you're aware of that I missed or additional jobs or events that should be included in our collections, please send them my way!

Sending productive thoughts to all of you. Enjoy this week's bounty of links.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Show Your Value

Community teams who can show how their work is impacting the marketing, sales, and success pipeline have a much easier time getting buy in from executives than teams who only point to reduced support costs.

Community as a growth engine vs community as a cost center.

-David Spinks

Influencing is a Two-Way Street

Influence and advocacy is a two-way street. In order to influence someone, you have to allow them to influence you.

Giving them a cookie is a one-time payment/transaction

So much of the thinking around "influencers" gets this wrong

-Rachel Happe

But Really... What is it That You Do?

❌ "I build communities."

✅ “I help customers support and educate each other at scale.”

✅ “I design social experiences that attract leads and engage our top prospects.”

✅ "I empower our biggest advocates to organize experiences around the globe on our behalf."

-David Spinks

What about you? What's a succinct but specific way of saying what you do?

Transmitting Feedback with Empathy

You can provide feedback on someone's company or product without being malicious. A core tenant of #DevRel is hearing feedback and working internally to fix those things. The clearer you are at providing that feedback, the faster it may get done.

-Amara Graham

Listen First, Build Second

Fostering community isn't just about bringing them to your product.

It's called a GoToMarket strategy - you need to GO to the Market. If you aren't listening the community will never shout for you.

-DevRelate

Tangibles 🤓

An Ounce of Prevention...

One of the most difficult parts of being in charge of a community is knowing what to do when someone violates the Code of Conduct or your Community Guidelines. It's a challenging situation, no matter how much you've prepared for it. However, the more you prepare in advance in the way of guidelines, expectations, consequences, and next steps, the better qualified you'll be to handle the circumstances when they finally do occur. Here are two articles that will help you think through this process:

How the new P4 Architectures of Participation pair with our Community Strategy

In the spirit of working out loud, Planet 4 has been blogging about the revamp of their open software. This week, they blogged about creating contributor pathways for each of the community personas. After they defined the various community personas, they mapped out the ways each of those community members would access the open-source project in order to ensure that everyone who tried to contribute had a clear path to do so. This is such a great exercise that every product should do! If you're looking to verify that your developer experience is solid, I'd encourage you to click through and see what you can take away from P4's process.

Looking for other articles on how to increase engagement in your community forum or onboard your community members successfully? Here are a few other articles that piqued my interest this week:

Organizing (and Producing) Successful Online Events

As we come up on what is traditionally known as "conference season" in the DevRel and Community worlds, more teams are trying (and struggling) to replicate the experience of a successful in-person event. The list of resources for creating an online event is still growing. Here are three articles that stood out to me this week:

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

Building Inclusive Communities, Workplaces, and an Inclusive Profession with Bassey Etim, Marjorie Anderson, and Nina Collins - Community Signal
What Makes a Facebook group "off the charts" Active? with Lindsay Russell - Gather Together
Collaboration Platforms with Joyce Lin - Developer Love
Boaz Ziniman, Principal Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services - Developer Advocate Stories
Working in Developer Relations with Kim Maida - Real Talk JavaScript
Dan Moore went from sci-fi to devrel - DevJourney Podcast
Building & Maintaining Community Integrity Through Acquisition with Max Altschuler - Masters of Community
Building Community Engagement and Content Through Online Webinars - Peers over Beers
Building a Community WITHOUT Technical Experience - Community Building Q & A with Jono Bacon (video)
What's the expected success rate for conference talk approvals? How to get speaker feedback? - DevRel Events (video)
Shifting to Online Community: The Future of DevRel (video)
How to Engage Communities During Changing Times by Yashraj Nayak (Twitter thread with embedded videos)

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

Normally it's easy for folks in DevRel to think about others and help their careers. But when was the last time you thought about yourself and your own professional development? Take a look at these great events that could help you get leveled up at your job.

Interested in speaking at an upcoming DevRel event? DevRel Asia is coming up on Nov 14, and their CFP is currently open!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate

Our Developer Advocate will continue to foster LogRocket's relationships within the web development community, keeping tabs on what product teams need to improve customer experiences. The Developer Advocate will help users understand LogRocket’s benefits and value proposition by contributing regularly to the editorial calendar. Topics will have a broad scope, from educational content creation (resources, tutorial), to thought leadership and some product marketing.

Developer Relations Engineer

The Developer Relations Engineer is responsible for ensuring App partners, including SaaS companies and independent developers, build and publish innovative solutions using the ActiveCampaign platform. This individual will be the first DevRel Engineer in the organization. They will have an opportunity to build/mold what DevRel means at AC.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

Looking for a new job right now? While you might be discouraged, thinking that many companies have frozen or cut back on hiring, fear not! We've collected 170 open jobs right here, from Individual Contributor roles to Manager positions, and everything in between.

If you're looking for a particular type of job, don't forget to filter by the appropriate keyword (for instance, try Technical Community Manager or Senior Individual Contributor) to show you the jobs that have been collected just for you. And don't forget to check out the open roles from our current sponsors LogRocket and Active Campaign.

Looking to hire? Siddharth Ram has a great thread about who to look for depending on what problems you're trying to solve.