DevRel Weekly - Issue 209 - We can't be responsible for everything

Welcome! 👋

As the calendar year winds down, so does the amount of content we produce as a community! Nevertheless, there are still a good number of excellent tweets, discussions, and articles to share this week.

What other topics would you like to learn about? I'd love to share a list of ideas if anyone's itching to create content but doesn't know what to focus on. In the meantime... let's take a look at what this week has brought us!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Reach "Wow!" quickly

One thing I've consistently had to relearn in developer marketing:

"Talk benefits, not features" doesn't work!

Developers are sick of vague promises and wary of black boxes.

Instead:

Demo - reach Wow! in <10 mins

Explain how it works

Show how real companies use in prod

-swyx (click through to read the full thread)

DevRel Advice Column

it’s time I finally start the blog series I’ve been thinking about for a long time about the invisible or “glue” work that DevRel does. the first up: events.

what are things you do related to events that you wished more people knew about? I know there’s a ton out there.

-Taylor Barnett

Click through to read the full discussion -- there are so many great tidbits!

What DevRel Isn't (Fully) Responsible For

As we've talked about before, there's often more for those of us in DevRel to do than we can possibly take on. But our motivation is always clear: help our community members. However, there are many things we aren't fully responsible for, and it's important to make that distinction. Here are two examples from this week:

If you've designed your DevRel Team to only create content then you've built a Content Team.

-Sharat Chander

DevRel is also about honesty.

Quantifying the results of DevRel is a challenge but devs aren’t just people who buy. They need to know it’s needed.

Remind your execs and sales teams that the approach of “push them harder to buy” may more than likely turn the devs away.

-Lewis Meyers

Tangibles 🤓

The Community-Member-Fit Score (CMFS)

Many organizations use NPS to gauge how happy customers are with their product, but the community platforms and programs don't always factor into that survey, so how do we know whether people are happy with the community itself? David Spinks recommends running a Community Member Fit Score (CMFS) survey instead. Click through to learn more.

How to Create more Effective Developer Content

Ricardo Ferreira touches on one of my favorite tips for creating content in this excellent Twitter thread. TL;DR: the more you can create a content "package," or "triangle" as Ricardo calls it, with multiple forms of content (video, blogpost, livestream, GitHub repo, conference talk, etc.), the more likely you are to not only reach but have an impact on your community! And on that note, if you'd rather read a blogpost than a Twitter thread, head over here.

The Perfect Community Metric – Finding Your North Star

For those of you who are tired of hearing phrases like "north star" and feel like you already have a good handle on which metrics to track, I see you! But give this blogpost a try, and in particular, the section titled "The Four Methods of Finding a Dollar Value." I found this blogpost as a result of this tweet from Richard Millington earlier this week as I was looking for a more in-depth description of the image I've included here.

While this chart doesn't give us a "golden ticket" to the ROI of Developer Relations, it does help us think critically about which experiments we can (and should) run to determine what our value is. Take a look and see if it will help you determine which experiments to run in the quarters to come and better define what your value is, both for your community as well as the organization.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts and Videos

After Pulse: DevRel Beyond Developers - Community Pulse
Case Study: How Dell Technologies is Building a DevRel Team with Brad Maltz - The New Stack Makers
Unlock the role of DevRels - building a vibrant web3 community (Twitter space)
Let's Talk DevRel with Head of Developer Engagement Stephanie Wong! (Twitter space)

Events 📆

DevRel Events

From webinars to conferences and meetups, events are a great way to boost your career and meet new people! Do you know of an event that's not on our list? Please let me know!

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

Not challenged at your job but not sure where to start looking for something new? Take a peek at our list of jobs and see if anything jumps out at you.

As a bonus this week, I have a Twitter thread for you, whether you're looking for a new job or looking for your next DevRel practitioner. Thanks to Izzy and David Spinks for these great tips!