DevRel Weekly - Issue 188 - Meaningful work, defining audiences, and scaling perspectives instead of people

Welcome! 👋

Hey folks! Hope your week is going well. Mine is off to a bit of an odd start with a winter storm moving through the Sierras in California. 😅 But I'm staying warm and cozy and inspired by the content that y'all published this past week!

Let's dig in...

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Defining Audiences can be Difficult

"Who is the main audience for docs? Like prospects, new users, technical people...?"

Everyone. The answer (and often the problem) is everyone.

-Amara Graham

Stick to Meaningful Work

Community managers receive a lot of "asks" from various stakeholders. Stick to community building work that is meaningful:
✅ Building relationships with community members (one-on-one, it's worth your time)
✅ Deliver value to members
✅ Measure what matters

-Community Coach Carmen

Be sure to Scale Perspectives

For a long time I have talked about the value of the scale of community; you can often garner more community members than staff members, many hands make light work, etc.

This is still 100% true. But the other part I'm increasingly talking about is the scale of perspectives.

Community allows you to bring in far more perspectives than you ever could have in your company. Yes, AI and tech are automating many processes. But perspective is something that is difficult to program in. And people want to hear from others with the same perspective...

Even when we're talking about B2B, understanding how a 100-person food supply business in Atlanta uses a product is very different from a 1000-person software company in SF. Perspective is valuable.

-Evan Hamilton (it's worth clicking through the read the full thread!)

Communities take time.

Communities take time.

They won't be made in a day.

While calculating the resources that go into making a community, it's common to ignore the time it takes.

If you aren't willing to put in the time, building your community is going to be quite difficult.

-Glynk

Tangibles 🤓

Community Response Guidelines

Responding to community members can simultaneously be a dopamine-filled task and also a draining one. Tessa Kriesel wrote up some tips for responding to community posts:

Respond within 24 hours
Be kind
Put yourself in their shoes
Add some type of value, especially before you ask anything of them

Advice from 50+ Dev Advocates

YK recently took the time to consolidate feedback from 50+ Developer Advocates on everything from getting started in DevRel to how to excel in your career. 🤩 I highly recommend reading this (very indepth) Twitter thread.

How to Leverage Social Listening in Your Community

Gathering (and assessing) feedback is one of the most important parts of Developer Relations, but how often do we actually set aside time to do this? Personally speaking, we often ask for feedback on specific features or approach particular groups of community members for their insights, but looking for patterns in our day-to-day forums and social channels often falls by the wayside. Tirza Austin explains why leveraging "social listening" can make a big difference in how you serve your community members in this recent article.

Tangents 🐰

Skip to the More Interesting Questions

A huge part of Developer Advocacy is advocating for the folks who use your products, which sometimes means presenting user stories alongside the feedback you're collecting. Laura Klein suggests avoiding the standard "As a user, I want to x so that I can y" scenario and instead encourages us to ask more interesting questions.

Storytime 📚

Common Room

Common Room is the intelligent community growth platform that helps you deepen relationships, build better products, and drive business value. Discover what’s most important, nurture key personas, measure program impact, and collaborate across your organization. Ready to get started? Sign up for free at commonroom.io/signup.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

After Pulse: Moving from Execution to Strategy - Community Pulse
How to Think about Events and More with Erica Moss - Peers over Beers
Don't Judge a Career by its Title - GitLab Talks DevRel (Twitter Space)
What is an AWS Developer Advocate with Romain Jourdan - Jon Myer Podcast (video)

Events 📆

"Developer Education in the Front Lines" Webinar

Ever wondered what it takes to create a successful developer education framework? "Developer Education in the Front Lines" is a webinar you can't miss. Get an inside look into what it takes to conceptualize and build a developer education experience. The focus of this webinar will be on the practical and how-to — very little top-down jargon. Save your seat today!

Nexus

Join Orbit at Nexus on May 31 for a free, virtual event for community builders. Get fresh insights and tactics to grow and scale your community. Connect, learn, and navigate community growth, together.

Events 📆

DevRel Events

Meetups, webinars, and conferences... they're all coming your way! Let me know if you're going to be at any of these great events. Even if I won't be in attendance, I'd be happy to connect you with others who will be.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Engineer

At Seaplane, we are building the future of cloud development. We are looking for a DevRel engineer to join our team. You will be the face of Seaplane towards the developer community. Growing our global audience through code, community-building events, and working directly with developers to highlight the newest solutions in distributed systems across cloud markets.

Developer Advocate

Adapty helps mobile app developers grow in-app subscriptions. We’re looking for our first DevRel/Dev Advocate who can be the voice of our 3k+ community. We’ve seen companies growing 10x with our product and it’s our mission to help developers learn how to make money with their apps. You’ll start hands-on building trust and knowledge in our community and later lead and build our devrel team.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

If you're in the market for a new job, you've come to the right place! In additions to the many individual contributor roles we have in our collection, many new senior and manager positions have been posted recently, as well as a few entry level roles.

Best of Luck on the Job hunt!