Collecting Feedback, Creating Career Paths, and More -- Issue 58  March 21st 2019

Defining a career path for Developer Relations

Bear Douglas has managed to take the daunting task of creating a DevRel career path & distilled it into straightforward responsibilities found across 3 components: technical quality, collaboration, & execution. This article for anyone even tangentially related to DevRel as well as practitioners, whether you're trying to build a DevRel team or figure out what your next career move is.

slack.engineering  

Documentation, DevEx, and Current Events

If you're looking for ways to improve your developer experience, perhaps you should think about making your documentation interactive. Adam DuVander gives an overview of what this looks like and how to implement it on your site.

If you're new to DevRel (or still in school and trying to figure out how to piece together a relevant degree), you may be wondering if a Technical and Professional Communication degree is necessary, or at least helpful. Tom Johnson lays out some of the potential risks rewards in a recent post that's worth a read if you're trying to figure out your next career move.

Delighting customers (in our case, developers) is a huge part of Developer Relations. A big part of that delight comes from knowing our community members well enough that we can serve their specific needs and help them find solutions to problems, whether they fall within our product's purview or not. Dion Almaer digs into the concept of delighting developers and elevating the developer experience in "ecosystem-enhancing, easy to copy ways" in his recent blogpost.

While documentation & developer experience go together like peanut butter & jelly, this third topic might catch you off guard at first. But this timely piece from Tom Johnson caught my eye this week. At a glance, the recent Boeing 737 Max disasters don't have much to do with DevRel other than making sure that you're not flying on one in the near future. But Tom digs into possible comparisons that could be drawn to the technical documentation that we often write, and expresses gratitude that the documentation we're responsible for isn't life-threatening! (Interested in more tech comparisons to the recent events? Check out this piece from J. Paul Reed.)

idratherbewriting.com  

Gathering Feedback through Surveys, Open Communication, and Diversity of Opinions

A truly successful feedback loop involves more than just receiving feedback and passing it along. It includes getting to know the people submitting the feedback so that you understand their problems more fully. It requires an individual who can accurately distill and communicate the essence of the feedback to the proper people. It also demands a diverse group of customers to ensure that no individual voice is louder than another. Kat Holmes, UX Design at Google, expands on this last idea in a recent interview, pointing out that you need to not only pay attention to the voices that are present, but seek out the voices that are missing.

Surveys have become something that we simply ignore, whether via email, at the end of a customer support phone call, or on the receipt that we receive from the store. But what if there were a way to make surveys enjoyable to the customer and therefore valuable to the company again? This article from Martha Brooke at CMSWire walks through the common pitfalls of surveys as well as how to write surveys that can result in valuable feedback from your community.

As most stakeholders will tell you, driving product adoption is an important business metric. But how does DevRel fit into it? Vikas Goyal walks through how being open and transparent, accepting healthy feedback, and building a community of advocates -- all DevRel-related metrics -- can help to drive adoption and increase the understood value of DevRel within your company.

Speaking of metrics and business value... Max Katz is taking a different tactic this year at IBM. They've analyzed their events from last year and divided them into categories: those where they successfully found new active developers and those which resulted in additional awareness. Read more about their process and how they're using these categories to set expectations around the company.

adobe.com  

7 Lessons From Asana’s Community Launch (+6 Bonus Principles)

If you're looking to launch an online community in the near future, you'll want to dig into this insightful blogpost from Carrie Melissa Jones. In it, she walks through the steps that Asana took to launch their new Asana Together program. As she says,

...[Asana's] become one of the most recent technology companies to take the leap into organizing a thoughtful and robust community program, paving the way for other organizations looking to do the same.

Looking for more ways to lead and empower your community? Check out these 6 principles from Virginie Glaenzer.

cmswire.com