FUNNEL OF CAUSALITY HOW TO
People have natural affinities - you are more likely to do well with community if you already organize meetups, you are more likely to be great at content if you are a regular on the speaker circuit, you are more likely to understand how to plug user gaps with product feedback if you already built one, etc. Unhappiness arises when there is an expectations mismatch between what the company wants out of DevRel and what each DevRel is naturally good at.
Instead of answering your questions, I hope to offer you better ones. Instead of solutions, I'll offer structure. But I've lived it for a while and wanted to write down my evolving thoughts for others who are going down this same path. I of course don't have the perfect answer. Yet despite lack of visibility, companies continue to invest! Because we do know that through all the noise and gladhanding, some value does get created and it is unique to all the other user acquisition channels available. Loudly performing "DevRel", yet indistinguishable from " Con". I did cherry pick an egregious anecdote, but it helps illustrate the typical state of DevRel accountability today.
My company was one of them, spending thousands on a Gold slot for which we got 4 tickets, presumably to learn DevRel best practices and hire great talent. The organizers did an incredible job garnering 18 sponsors, all duly ignored.
FUNNEL OF CAUSALITY FULL
The full videos of talks to this highly anticipated paid event worth hundreds of dollars per ticket were released on YouTube, with a total view count of 601 (not a typo). Today in 2021 people continue to talk about how hard it is to measure DevRel. Drinks were drunk, hands were shook, empty promises made. Hundreds of DevRels flew in to hear DevRels thoughtlead DevRel. The 2 day schedule was packed with 48 speakers with impressive titles stack ranked by follower count.
People breathlessly tweeted about how this was the most important topic in DevRel, to general agreement. "Games are won by players who focus on the playing field –- not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard." - Warren BuffettĪ few years ago the key theme of one of the DevRelCons was "metrics". That's because we don't agree on what effective DevRel is, and we don't agree on the tradeoffs of lagging vs leading metrics for a creative, unattributable, intimately human endeavor. Description: DevRel is hot but nobody knows how to measure it.