If you measure devrel by views, the established industry metric is "cost per mille" aka cost per thousand people reached.In fact, you are very expensive affiliate marketing. If you are in "devrel" but you walk like marketing, talk like marketing, and are measured like marketing, you are in marketing.Totally understandable, but could be better. The reality is often the ratio of this two way street traffic is 99% outbound and 1% inbound, because the product/engineering orgs haven't set aside any bandwidth for "shadow PM-ing" from devrel and all of devrel's metrics are outbound focused.A lot of companies will proclaim that their approach to developer relations is different from developer evangelism because it is a "two way street", meaning you put product in front of people but also bring people's opinions back into product.We'll explore each in turn, but first some context: How you are measured depends on what your strengths are and what your company actually thinks devrel is.
There are three emerging sub-specialities of developer relations: community-focused, content-focused, and product-focused. Don't judge a fish by its ability to climb trees.
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.
However MAD is multi-causal and a lagging indicator so you need leading indicators which you have more direct control over.You could try "monthly active clusters" but you'll want each cluster's usage to grow as well so you end up indexing on "developers" anyway. Every other company measuring devrel eventually settles on this, so just cut right to the chase.If growth is 0% or worse then whatever you are doing isn't working. Stop looking: Your North Star metric is "monthly active developers". If this upsets you, please read something else. Sometimes "DevRel" is one person (who actually holds the title "Developer Advocate" or "DX Engineer"), sometimes "Devrel" is an industry. I will also have inconsistent capitalization and voice because I am condensing a massive amount of thoughts and trust you are smart enough to figure it out. This is a "201" blogpost rather than a "101" - I'm aiming to cover what introductory blogposts don't say. Note: I write for new DevRels as well as people running DevRel programs. 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.
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