DevRel Weekly - Issue 63 - Networking, Management Tips, and more.

Welcome! 👋

This week brought a lot of networking opportunities for folks, with Community Matters Conference and Refresh 19. It also brought a number of conversations about networking online, with commentary from David Spinks as well as a debate on whether networking is overrated.

I also came across a great blogpost with networking tips from our Community Manager friends in the Science industry. Needless to say, it's clear that even those of us who make connections for a living are hungry for connections with people who understand our day-to-day roles.

As you approach a new month, I encourage you to take time to connect with those around you, not because your job requires it, but because the simple act of finding others who understand our challenges leads to a sense of belonging that can be rare in a day and age where loneliness is common, particularly for those who are a team of one.

If you're actively working in a Developer Relations role, join us over at the DevRel Collective. If you're slightly outside of that realm, look for other Slack or Discourse teams that have a similar goal: providing a safe space for professionals to exchange resources and encourage one another.

Don't know where to look for people who are experiencing the same issues as you? Reach out to me. I'm always happy to facilitate new connections!

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

Community Guidelines = Constitution

A student of mine just wrote that “community guidelines are the constitution of [an online] community” in an essay and I think that’s just about a perfect way of putting it.

-Dr. Jennifer Beckett

The First Few are the Most Difficult

The phase of building 👩‍🔧a Community around DevRel 🥑 for a brand/organization from 0️⃣to1️⃣ is a bigger challenge than scaling it from 1️⃣to1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ 📈.

-Arkodyuti Saha

Communities Influence Organizations

Communities are often viewed at the superficial level - engagement, connection, and support - and they do provide all of that.

However, structurally, they are a different governance and operational model that creates more fluid, agile, inclusive, and scalable organizations.

-Rachel Happe

Communities != Networks

Communities and networks are not the same.

In a community, everyone sees everything. This means every newcomer has a chance of being noticed.

In a network, users and algorithms determine what gets seen. Which means that large voices are amplified while newcomers are quietened.

-Sahil Lavingia

An Important Lesson for Those who Build Communities

Don't attach your identity to any project as either are subject to change.

-Kelsey Hightower

Tell a Compelling Story

Literally everyone believes in the power of community.

It’s just hard to get execs to prioritize because:

it can take a long time to start showing results

it’s hard to measure, so it’s hard to prove the value

The solution is to tell a compelling story.

-David Spinks

Customers Control the Conversation

This tweet from Refresh 19 stood out to me this week:

"Customers want interactions where they are in control of the conversation and the company isn't. That's the difference between CRM and engagement."

-Esteban Kolsky, quoted by Alan Berkson

Reasons why your Community Strategy isn't Working

🖐️✌️7 reasons your community strategy isn't working:
1. Focused on the wrong people
2. No compelling purpose
3. Inconvenient or uninspiring gathering place
4. No enforcement of policy
5. Members don't know how to participate
6. Too hard to find/join community
7. Success isn't measurable

-David Spinks

“Help Us Make It Amazing”

By changing your announcement from "We have a great new product" to "Help us make it amazing!" you'll not only stand out from your competition, but you'll engage your community in a new way.

This lets members point out flaws without dumping on the project. It gives members a sense of influence and ownership. It increases the number of members who will promote the project at the end.

A tiny difference in words creates a big difference in mindset.

-Rich Millington

DevRel Advice Column

There are a lot of folks looking for a concise explanation of the value of DevRel this week. Many of them resulted in great conversations! These and other questions that folks have about DevRel and related activities are below. Time to dig deep and offer some nuggets of wisdom.

You get 1 tweet. What is the main problem that developer advocacy solves? Bonus points for single word answers. Will be looking at all of these for an upcoming blog.

-Kris Nova

As I am sure everyone is tired of pizza and beer at meetups. What would you like to see served?

-Ell Marquez

Are there any white papers or case studies on the effects of developer advocacy in general and/or on the effects of empathy more specifically?

Trying to circulate and promote the concept at work 😁

-Peter Benjamin

Tangibles 🤓

Management Round-Up

If you're in a DevRel or Community Management role, you know that it comes with its own set of challenges. From how to pull together the right team of people to knowing what needs are most important to facilitating relationships with remote teams, it's no easy task! Three blog articles from this week address these issues and more:

The 5 Biggest DevRel Challenges (and how to mitigate them)

A few weeks ago I asked for help in determining the biggest challenges in DevRel. You all took the time to write out some thoughts, explaining your struggles as well as why you stay in the industry despite the hardships.

Thanks to your contributions, I pulled together 5 of the top challenges in this recent blogpost, published by Vanilla Forums. I'd love to know what you think. Are these indeed the biggest challenges? Or are there other ones that plague you more? Hit reply and let me know!

Twitter Chat: Building Communities

CodeNewbie's Twitter chat this week revolved around building communities. From what makes a community strong to the challenges of creating a successful community, they covered a lot of ground! Check out this thread and dive into each of the questions for a variety of responses and great conversations.

5 Great Tips for when you’re a Lone Wolf Community Professional

While the number of "lone wolf" community teams (aka a single person managing and building a community) is steadily going down according to Hoopy's recent State of Developer Relations, there are still a fair number of us who are the sole person responsible for the well-being of our technical communities. Nick Emmett wrote up a list of 5 tips which are a must-read for anyone who falls into this category.

Build a Community: Don’t Talk at People. Talk with People!

Talking with our audience instead of at them seems like an obvious choice, but so many companies miss this small distinction. Growing Community suggests that we focus on these three points if we want to build a healthy, thriving community:

Create Depth: Join the conversation
Create Closeness: Bring your audiences close
Create two-way content: Avoid having all of your content be one-way that talks at people like you are shouting at them

Tangents 🐰

Open Source Won't Save A Subpar Product

Open source projects often sound like a great way to create a community around a proprietary project, but all too often, companies jump into these types of projects with both feet, only to realize that it's a lot more work than they anticipated, and the payoff may not be what they're hoping for.

Jono Bacon addresses the 4 questions you must ask yourself (and your company) before you take on a project like this.

Is there a market need/fit for your product?
What is the on-boarding experience like for new users?
What are your primary goals for open sourcing it?
What new skills and resources do you need to build in your company to do this work well?

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

I lost track of the number of great-looking podcast episodes that came through my RSS feeds this week! I'll be downloading a handful of these to listen to on my upcoming flights.

Know of any other great community or DevRel-related podcasts? Send them my way!

After Pulse: Technical? or Tech-Savvy? - Community Pulse
Building and Nurturing Atlassian’s Community Leaders Program with Erica Moss - Community Signal
Public Speaking In Your Second Language - Bits of B
How to be a developer advocate without being an Instagram model with Burke Holland - Frontier Podcast
Skills for better developer community engagement with Jeremy Meiss - Under the Hood of Developer Marketing
Low config, open source, and the rising dev rel community with Jason Lengstorf - Frontier Podcast

Events 📆

DevGuild: Product Marketing

On Thursday, May 2, Heavybit is hosting DevGuild: Product Marketing, a 200 person half-day conference for founders and product marketers. The founders of GitLab, Zapier, Bitnami, npm, Netlify, and product/platform leaders at Cloudflare, WeWork, Stripe, CloudBees, Shopify, and more will be discussing the tactics & strategies that great dev and B2B SaaS cos use to message, launch, and drive adoption for their products. RSVP using this link for a discount on any remaining tickets.

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

There are so many amazing conferences going on right now! Are you attending one soon? Take a peek at our list of upcoming events to see if yours is on the list and if it's not, let me know!

Community Matters (CommaConf) Conference Recap

CommaConf happened last week in India, run by Community First. From the tweets I was seeing, it looks like it was a great event, including a panel on DevRel and unconference conversations about things like monetizing your community. You can check out all the tweets here.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Know someone who would make a great DevRel Professional or Community Manager but they don’t know where to apply? Share our ever growing collection of jobs with them to see if anything catches their eye!