DevRel Weekly - Issue 87 - DevRel is a Team Sport

Welcome! 👋

At first glance, the articles from this week seemed fairly independent and unrelated, but as I looked through the summaries again this morning, a theme made itself clear:

DevRel is a team sport.

We’re constantly working with teams across the company, collaborating and consulting, offering perspective and communicating feedback.

And here’s the key: if we’re not doing that... if there’s a week that goes by where you’re not working with a variety of teams to accomplish something that will benefit your community, then I’d wager you're hogging the ball too much and need to pass the puck to someone else at the company.

By collaborating more with teams across the company, we not only have a better opportunity to serve our community, but we solidify the value of our work in the minds of our coworkers.

Best,
Mary (@mary_grace)
DevRel Weekly Patreon

Tidbits 🕔

DevRel Advice Column

I’d love to connect with other people doing developer experience, internal tooling, developer happiness works— any kind of tooling and process enhancements to boost productivity in their org.

I’m especially interested in how you measure and frame the value that you bring.

-Coraline Ada Ehmke

Which department should Developer Relations belong to (and if you're so inclined, please share why)?

-Kim Maida

Create Brave Spaces

Let's focus on creating brave spaces for challenging conversations over safe spaces. We can't guarantee everyone will feel safe but if we agree to allow each other grace when we make mistakes and we commit to outcomes, we can achieve more inclusion. -- Elisa Birkhofer at #cmxconnect

-Nicole Petrak

For more tweets from this great CMX Connect event, follow the CMX Connect hashtag

Data Doesn't Lie, but People's Interpretation Can Vary Wildly

Community Manager Tip of the Day:

-Data doesn't lie.
-People's interpretation of data can vary wildly.

SO...

Develop and socialize the correct narrative of your #community so you know the right interpretation is out there. Helps you stay sane & keeps people better informed.

-Shannon Emery

Don't Stretch Yourself too Thin

Most sub-groups within a community fail. They either lack a good leader or there aren't enough members to sustain them.

A good rule of thumb, if there aren't already related groups outside of your platform, it's too soon to create them within the platform.

-Rich Millington

Tangibles 🤓

Don’t Be Uninformed

If you're even tangentially involved in DevRel, you're likely familiar with the debate around just how technical we need to be in order to be DevRel professionals. There are a variety of answers and viewpoints, but I think Rich Millington frames it nicely in this post:

If you’re managing a community, you should be wired into the topical issues of that sector... No-one expects you to be an expert, but there’s no excuse for being uninformed.

Collaborating with Developer Relations Part 3: Product and DevRel

Collaborating across teams is one of the unique features of DevRel. In this series, Orbit co-founders Patrick Woods and Josh Dzielak have touched on how we work with and support Marketing and Sales, and now turn to a team that's near and dear to my heart: Product.

From helping drive the product roadmap to self-service plans and community involvement, there are a lot of ways that DevRel can partner with Product to contribute value. As Patrick says toward the end of the post,

DevRel teams can act as a force multiplier for other teams across a company by adding more developer perspective to their efforts... When the developer perspective permeates the whole of a developer-focused or developer-serving organization, marketing becomes more confident, sales more effective, and product more informed. A well-integrated developer relations team helps make this happen and the effectiveness of their own efforts is increased in the process.

100 Days of DX: Complete!

Congrats to Jarkko Moilanen for wrapping up his 100 Days of DX posts. There has been some great content throughout the last few months and he's captured it all at 100daysdx.com for posterity. In this 100th post he talks about what motivated him to create this resource and some of the lessons he learned along the way.

Craving more Developer Experience tips and tricks? Nordic APIs recounts 7 mantras for quality developer experience that came out of a recent webinar.

Tangents 🐰

Content Strategy at a Startup: a Case Study

Content strategy is a combination of good technical writing, an understanding of what your community is looking for, and organizational skills. A good collection of content is, as Hannah Kirk says, “an integral part of the strategic direction of product and user experience.” In this great article, she talks about the content strategy that she created at Incorta and the process of turning a random assortment of content into a clear compendium of relevant information for the Incorta community.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

How to Build a Tech Community That Motivates Even the Unpaid with Jono Bacon - The New Stack
Understanding Talk Selection In Conferences with Kristina Schneider - Technically True
Que es ser Developer Advocate? with Laura Morinigo - MediaChicas + Podcast (in Spanish)
Researching How Developers Use API Docs with Andrew Head - WTD (video)

Events 📆

DevRel Weekly Events

Whether you're looking for a webinar, a meetup, or a full-blown conference, we've got opportunities for you to meet other DevRel professionals around the world. Know of other events that aren't on our list? Be sure to let me know!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Technical Developer Evangelist

Testim uses artificial intelligence to speed-up the authoring, execution, and maintenance of automated tests. Here's a note from their Head of Marketing, Francis Adanza, about an exciting job opportunity:

Hello Folks, we're looking for a Technical Developer Evangelist to join our team. If you like to code as well as talk about it, then we should chat. Learn more about Testim and the role here or feel free to contact me directly!

Developer Advocate Manager

We are looking for a Developer Advocate Manager that will join the Developer Experience (DX) team in Stockholm. You will be responsible for managing our team of Developer Advocates, including supporting their career growth, and driving Spotify’s developer relations strategy.

Developer Advocate

Hasura is an open source project at the intersection of the GraphQL and cloud-native movements and empowers developers to build powerful and scalable applications easily. We're looking for a developer advocate based in San Francisco/ Bay Area to help developers who are using or interested in GraphQL & Hasura to achieve success with these technologies. Our idea candidate is someone well versed with application development, who loves to explain technical concepts in creative ways and most importantly is an empathetic individual, who listens to developers and is able to provide actionable input to the product & marketing teams.

Jobs 👩‍💻

DevRel Jobs

Whether you're looking to start a new career in developer relations, or looking for a change in your career check out what we've been curating to get some ideas or find a new job. You never know, you might find your dream position there. We're wishing you the best of luck!