DevRel Weekly - Issue 122 - Trends, Fundraising, and Lots of Metrics

Welcome! 👋

Have you ever had a weekend that didn't actually feel like a weekend? You know the ones... where you get to Sunday night and look around, wondering where the weekend went. If you're nodding your head, then you also understand why this week's issue is a day late 😆

Lots of great things have happened this week though! In addition to loads of great content included below, there were some exciting announcements, including this one from Orbit, who just raised a $4 million seed funding round! I'm thrilled about this for two reasons: A) Orbit is a fantastic product that has the potential to revolutionize how companies engage with their communities 2) It's a huge feather in the DevRel industry's cap as far as proving business value! Congrats to everyone involved. I'm anxious to see how this drives continued investment in DevRel and Community teams and tools in 2021.

As we're looking forward to new opportunities in 2021, don't forget about Community Manager Advancement Day on Jan 25. This year's theme is resilience, which feels particularly fitting given the difficulties we've faced in 2020. For more information about CMAD and the activities surrounding it this year, bookmark this announcement from CMX Hub.

As you're scrolling through the fantastic content below, don't miss Vanilla's 2021 Community Predictions ebook. The insights there are an important look at how our industry is growing.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. I'll be taking 2 weeks off from DevRel Weekly around Christmas and New Year's, both to save your inboxes and to take a step back from some of my daily responsibilities. If you have blogposts, podcast episodes, or articles in general that you'd like to send along for me to include in our last issue of the year, be sure to do so prior to December 12!

Tidbits 🕔

Treat Your Speakers Well

Conference organizers, this whole virtual conference thing is new for most speakers, even seasoned speakers. Without speakers, you have no conference. Treat them well, communicate often, be specific about logistics. SMDH at some of these conference organizers.

-Lorinda Brandon

Work Out Loud

Showing your community what you're doing is almost as important as doing it. Back-end operations are not necessarily clear, and if you're not promoting how you're helping them, you're losing out on a chance to build trust.

-Evan Hamilton

DevRel Metrics != Sales Metrics

Sales quota for Developer Relations is a terrible idea:

1) DevRel aren’t sales, they’re technical professionals. This usually yields mediocre salesperson.

2) Developers sentiment towards other:
Eng 🥰
DevRel 🙂
Business 😐
Sales 😱

3) You lose the DevRel-Devs true alignment 🤝

-Amir Shevat

In Summary

Developer Relations, a summary:

Mentorship

Sponsorship

Empathy

Community

Education

Tooling

-Roach

Set Your Community (and your Org) Up for Success

A good community strategy aligns an organization's goals with member needs - setting you up to succeed in both, keep engagement high & provide ROI.

-Glynk

Hire for the Role

Thinking about building a customer community? Hire a VP of Community to help you. Don’t leave this up to your VP of Marketing or Customer Success, especially if they haven’t done this before.

-Jill Ross

Repetition is a Powerful Tool

Creating an ongoing "series" of content or events is a really powerful community building tool.

Here's why:

it gives your content/events a brand

it promises future value

it's a repeatable process (less work)

it creates repetition for members

-David Spinks

Tangibles 🤓

Vanilla's 2021 Community Predictions

It's that time of year where we start to look forward: writing resolutions, reflecting on our work, and making predictions for the next year. Vanilla has released their new 2021 Community Predictions ebook with insights from 20 different professionals from the DevRel and Community industries. This is an incredibly valuable resource as we prepare for 2021 and look for ways to better serve our communities.

Hiring the first Developer Advocate

Hiring your first Developer Advocate can be a little intimidating if you haven't worked directly with a Developer Relations professional in the past. Being the first DevRel professional can be equally nerve-wracking! Patrick Mayr recently hosted a roundtable discussion about this process and documented some of the findings. From why you should hire a Dev Advocate fairly early to what qualities to look for and everything in between, this post is a great collection of tips, whether you're hiring or looking to be hired.

Looking for more information about how to market to developers in an early startup? Helen Min has some suggestions on what to do (and not do) in this recent post.

12 Metrics You Can't Miss in Your Community

When someone asks me "What metrics should I track?" I always answer with a question: "What questions are you trying to answer?" Knowing what problem you're trying to solve is always the best starting place for figuring out which metrics are most important to your company.

Once you have a better idea of your goals, it's time to find the right metrics to tell that story, at which point this post from Emiliano Agazzoni will come in handy. In it, he covers a number of common platforms and digs into which metrics actually matter (aka aren't vanity metrics). If you're managing a variety of online communities, you won't want to miss this piece. (Note: the article is in Portuguese, so be sure to open in a browser that has an easy translate option.)

Hungry for more metrics content? Check out these two talks from DevRelCon Earth:

Taking the next steps in dev rel metrics with Adam FitzGerald and Melissa Gurney Greene
Iterating on Developer Marketing … with Metrics! with Jonathan Gottfried

and don't miss this series from Jason St. Cyr - he just published an installment on content analytics.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

10 Online Association Community Leaders Discuss the Role of Community in 2020 - Association Chat Podcast
MongoDB’s Playbook for Breaking Into and Dominating a Market with Francesca Krihely - OV BUILD Podcast
Documenting APIs with Tom Johnson - Content Strategy Insights
Proving the Business Value of Community with Erica Kuhl - Masters of Community
How Many Ways Can You Build An Online Community? - Peers Over Beers
After Pulse: Budgets Rule Everything - Community Pulse
Evolution of Community Events in 2020 with Bethany Loft - Lauren Learns Things (video)

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

According to my sources, particularly the DevRel Weekly Events Collection and Twitter, there are still a handful of DevRel events this month, and at least one coming up next month. Will you be attending any of them?

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Evangelist

Did you know that you can recognize people by the way they type? This is what we do at TypingDNA, and are looking for a Developer Evangelist to join us in the mission of making the TypingDNA Authentication API the #1 choice at a BringYourOwnDevTool party. For this, you will attend and talk at events for devs, will technically help them on all the channels where they are, and also create various content (screencasts, videos, and the like).

Developer Evangelist - Moovweb

The future of development on the web is Jamstack, and our jam is bringing these performance and simplicity benefits to large, dynamic sites where traditional techniques don't apply. We're seeking a passionate Developer Evangelist who will blaze the trail for strategic community engagement and the growth of our developer base.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Kate here: Looking for employment can be one of the most challenging things we do in life. Sometimes all I can do is just browse at a few jobs every once in a while to make sure I see what's out there. Take a look at the DevRel Weekly Jobs Collection and see what's out there right now. You could be surprised and maybe inspired.

Developer Avocados 🥑

Adventcado

Looking for some inspiring stories presented in a fun format? The folks over at avocados.dev have put together an advent calendar of DevRel Professionals. Every day, they release another interview. Be sure to bookmark this page so you don't miss any of the fun.