DevRel Weekly - Issue 73 - Building Strategies, Improving Onboarding, and Managing your DevRel Career

Welcome! 👋

This week has flown by and it's looking like next week won't be that much different! I hope you take the time to slow down a bit this weekend -- focus on your needs and do something that will refresh you before next week begins.

I'll be on my way up to Portland, spending some time with family before OSCON starts next week. If you're going to be at OSCON, or the Community Manager meetup on Sunday, be sure to let me know! I'd love to meet you in person.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

P.S. Special thanks to our two new sponsors: Heroku and Bose. Be sure to check out both of their job listings below!

Tidbits 🕔

We Need to Slow Down

"Empathy is much harder than we think....But to build empathy we need to slow down. Perspective taking is crucial"

The problem: There is no marketing budget for slowing down and taking perspective. It's all go, go, go and deliver.

-Rachel Happe

About Building a Strategy

One month into the new gig and our community strategy is nearly complete. I’m not going to share the actual strategy, but I can talk about the components in an effort to help anyone out there trying to put one together. Here we go...

-Brian Oblinger, a thread

Save your Articles

Annual reminder to freelancers to save PDFs of your articles so they don’t get lost in a sudden site redesign or closing.

-Jerry Barrow

Thanks to Tom McLaughlin for the reminder that this applies to DevRel professionals as well!

DevEx Impacts Quality

Developer Experience directly impacts quality. People can't design creative and beautiful products (IMO) if their tooling and processes are getting in the way.

-Christie Russell

Equal to None but Inclusive of All

You might have heard #DevRel [compared to] product, outbound marketing, sales, PR, or engineering. Different companies have different definitions for their #DevRel program.

PS - The truth is, a successful Developer Relations program is none of these alone but inclusive of all of these.

-Rohit Kumar Guha

Tangibles 🤓

From Organising a House Party to Successfully Running a Community

If one of your unique skills is connecting people at parties, you may have the skills it takes to build communities. Paras Pundir explains more about how organizing an awesome house party applies to running a community, from balancing out the guest list to managing the flow of food and drinks to breaking the ice.

No-One Remembers Popular Activity A Year Later

Viral videos and the front page of HackerNews is a nice flash in the pan, but is it really the best way to approach building a community? Rich Millington argues that it's your long-term work that's truly going to stand out and be remembered in the long run.

You rarely want a spike, you want to create activity/content/discussions which reliably increase a clear metric in the community.

Community Management Basics: 8 Tips For Onboarding New Members

Onboarding new community members is one of the most important tasks of Developer Relations. After all, first impressions mean a lot, and you want to make sure your new community members have a good impression of your product's community! But how do you make sure that happens? Adrian Speyer lays out an 8 step plan to onboard your new members successfully, from welcome emails to sharing important community details to monitoring engagement statistics.

Here's How CMOs Can Close the Community Manager Talent Gap

Last week, Forbes conducted a fantastic interview with David Spinks about how the community (and DevRel) industry has changed over the past decade and what the important bits are to pay attention to as we progress. The fact that there's an article about Community Management in Forbes shows that we've come a long way in the last few years!

If you're hungry for more information about how community building has become a differentiator, take a look at this article from Misha Falcon, which addresses why unicorn companies and their investors are so focused on building communities around products.

Building a Dream DevRel Team

What makes up a "dream team" for Developer Relations? Anthony Kiplimo walks through the three key roles that should be represented on any DevRel team.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

What's in a Name? The Various Titles Within Developer Relations with Bear Douglas and Jeremy Meiss - Community Pulse
How Asana Got Community Buy-In, Feedback, Ambassadors & More with Josh Zerkel - C2C Podcast
Mary Thengvall, Author, Developer Relations Consultant, and Failed Pancreas Owner - The Rest of Us in Tech

Events 📆

Recent DevRel Talks

There have been a good number of great DevRel-related talks at conferences lately! Here's a quick run-down of the recent talks you should walk (or read about).

Tips for growing and nurturing developer communities by Katie Penn.
Sustainable developer relations by Matthew Revell. Read more about sustainable work travel in this article from Mickey Boxell.
How to Manage Early in Career DevRel by Lizzie Siegle (video only). Looking to start a career in DevRel? Here's a fantastic article from Knut Melvær.
Providing context for developer learning by Judith Malnick.
What you can learn from Hacktoberfest by Daniel Zaltsman. Read more about how to get the most out of hackathon sponsorships according to Susan Ibach.
Organic Growth and Platform Adoption, a panel led by Erin McKean.

Developer Relations Events

There are so many meetups on the horizon for the summer! Are you attending one? There's no time like the present to decide what events you want to attend. Take a peek at our list of upcoming events to see if one catches your eye.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Senior Developer Advocate

Heroku is looking for a Developer Advocate with past experience in a developer-facing role, creating demos, writing blog posts, and building communities. This role can be remote or you can work from a Salesforce office, but we would like you to be in a North American timezone. Also, this role will require 10-30% travel.

Sr. Developer Advocate

The mission of the Bose Developer Relations group is to enable a growing community of innovative and creative developers to deliver amazing experiences to our customers. We do this by engaging our community around the world, at key events, in key regions, and online through our portal, workshops, tutorials, sample code, demos and via forums, social media, and other channels. Representing the needs of our developer community and partners back to platform teams at Bose, we will make building 3rd party applications easier and scalable. Working with outstanding members of our developer community and with supporting groups at Bose, we will find the best ways to embrace these innovations, showcasing them to our customers and inspiring continued integration and increased value of our platforms.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

If the idea of looking for a new job instantly overwhelms you, check out our collection of open Developer Relations and Community manager jobs for a fast track to the application process.