Issue 211 - 2023 Strategies and a look back at 2022  December 22nd 2022

Resources for Strategy Building

If you're looking for a few good articles to help you set your team up for strategic success in 2023, you're in luck! There were several great links this week, including tutorials, tips, and thought-provoking discussion starters.

• Telling our Story by Laura Santamaria. DevRel as a field isn't great about explaining our value in the context of the company's larger picture. How can we do better?
• Using metrics to understand community growth and business impact by Common Room. A look at the most important metrics that will help you develop a data-based community growth strategy, quantify your success, and prove your value to the business.
• Showing cross-functional community value to your sales organization by Tiffany Oda. The community provides a stepping stone to building a relationship with the company and the people who interact with it, and also gives a head start to product knowledge and adoption, providing value to the sales team should the member decide to enter the funnel.
• Symbiotic, Tangible, Existential: 3 Pillars of Effective Goal-Setting for Online Communities by Noele Flowers. Discover how better goal-setting can be the secret to your online community's success.

devrelstrategist.com  

What's your focus on Developer Experience for 2023?

If your company is looking into expanding your focus on developer experience in 2023 (not the internal experience of your own developers, but the experience of the developers using your products), the two articles I've linked below might be interesting to you. The first, a thoughtful blogpost from Stephen O'Grady digs into how your org chart as well as your budget reflects your organization's true prioritization of this topic. The second, by Bill Doerrfeld, takes a deeper look at the competitive advantage of a solid developer experience.

• On Organizational Structures and the Developer Experience - The two questions you should be asking to understand how your organization prioritizes the developer experience of your product:
  • Do you have a role explicitly and solely responsible for the overall developer experience?
  • And if the answer to that is yes, what is their budget, headcount and functional mandate/scope of authority?
• Looking to the Future of Developer Experience - Improving the DX means many different things depending on your context. It could be a subtle user interface tweak, adding relevant code samples or making your documentation more intuitive.

redmonk.com  

New to devrel? Talk to your community.

If you're fairly new to developer relations or community building and are working at an organization that has an already-established community, Amanda Martin encourages you to talk to your community members, and I couldn't agree more. By making it a priority to get to know your current community members during the onboarding process, you have a significant advantage when it comes to building a strategy for phase 2 (or 3) of building out your community program.

dev.to