DevRel Weekly - Issue 207 - Strategy, ROI, and Creating Value

Welcome! 👋

Oof - it's been a tough week or so of travel, fam! It's been a while since I've been so down and out while traveling, but I've gotten hit by a few different acute issues (food poisoning, anyone?) on this trip and I'm still reeling a bit from the aftermath, hence the late issue this week.

Despite my tardiness, there is still a lot of great content out there for you all to enjoy, so let's dig in!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

p.s. If you're looking for a good laugh this week, this thread from Brendan O'Leary had me vacillating between rolling my eyes and laughing. 😅

Tidbits 🕔

Why do we create strategies?

Strategy is a definition of risk valuation and reward opportunities across multiple focus areas. If you're defining strategy simply by naming a bunch of tactics, you're missing out on the creativity boost a good strategy framework can provide for a devrel team.

Developer relations opportunities can appear and disappear quickly. Collaboration proposed during a hallway discussion at a conference. A last-minute invitation to be on a livestream or podcast. You need to empower your devrel team to make decisions quickly and decisively.

Strategy provides the framework to make swift decisions that benefit the company and the community as a whole.

-Laura Santamaria

Community Building is Storytelling

Community building is a whole bunch of storytelling.

Telling your story. Listening to others' stories. Sharing community members' stories with your team.

If you're applying for a #community role and listing your skills, storytelling should absolutely be included.

-Taylor Harrington

Create Value

Best #DevRel advice ever?

Provide value to the community.
Measure your impact.
Get feedback.
Improve.
Repeat.

-Advocu

What can we do right now?

Right now you should:

Publish more content

Host more webinars

Plan in-person events

Building out a community

You'll convert more customers now, but you'll also be the brand prospects remember as helpful when ready to buy.

Plant seeds now. Harvest later.

-Patrick Campbell

Tangibles 🤓

Developer Advocates need to be better event citizens

This topic has come up in the past, but I'm seeing it more and more as in-person conferences are coming back and more DevRel practitioners are choosing to fly in for their talk and then leave again shortly after, whether for health reasons, budget cuts, or other reasons entirely. How can we be better citizens of the events we're attending? Floor Drees shares advice on how to get the most out of and give the most back to the events.

p.s. I also address this topic briefly in my latest conversation starter over on Patreon. Join in and let me know what you think!

#A11y: Accessibility Is Part of the Developer Experience

In this thought-provoking article, Jennifer Riggins encourages us to expand our mental image of The Developer using our products when we're trying to improve their experience.

The tech industry works hard to break away from monolithic architecture. Yet, we’ve neglected to move away from the idea of the monolithic developer experience.

A Shift in the Industry

Between the pandemic, the expansion of the tech industry, and the economic shifts of the past few months, Developer Relations has gone through a number of iterations over the last year or five. But what might be coming next? Laura Santamaria shares some thoughts in a recent post.

Community-Generated Revenue – Maximise Your Community ROI

"What's the ROI on that?" has long been a dreaded phrase for many community professionals. It can be a difficult question sometimes, but with the increased tooling at our fingertips these days, we're able to draw more correlations between community activity and customer retention, new prospects, and expanding current opportunities. Rich Millington shares a few ways to do that in this recent article.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

The Future of DevRel and Databases with Tejas Kumar - Modern Web
Why should you care about open source licenses by Oleskii Borysenko (video)
Scaling Developer Success with Kate Holterhoff
What we learned from the pandemic - DevRel Roundtable with Jonan Scheffler, Luca Buchholz, Richard Süselbeck, and Alessandro Palmieri (video)
Getting Started with Setting Strategy for your Community - Community Manager Live (video)
Community Management Tips - Community Manager Live (video)

Events 📆

DevRel Events

There are still a handful of events, meet ups, and webinars happening this month. Come see what's happening next!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate - North America

Camunda is the leader in process orchestration software. With Camunda, business users collaborate with developers to model and automate end-to-end processes using BPMN-powered flowcharts that run with the speed, scale, and resiliency required to compete in today’s digital-first world.

The Camunda Developer Relations team exists to serve the Camunda developer community and we are looking for a Developer Advocate to join our team and create resources that allow our community members to get up and running with our products quickly as well as represent the community’s feedback internally to our Product and Engineering teams.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

Looking for a new gig? Check out our Job Collection to see what piques your interest.