What Is Devrel and the Rolls and Responsibilities in Developer Relations?

I was interviewed by Sai of Redpoint based on these blogposts:

• https://www.swyx.io/community-builder/
• https://www.swyx.io/measuring-devrel/

The session was covered by Tom Tunguz, whose blog I love (https://tomtunguz.com/shawn-wang-offi...) and the feedback was wonderful!

Full video on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guK1XiLQbH8

Timestamps

• [00:01:42] What is DevRel? 
• [00:04:59] Where should DevRel report? 
• [00:06:57] Getting Started with Early Stage DevRel 
• [00:12:28] How to Structure DevRel Efforts 
• [00:16:02] When to Hire First DevRel 
• [00:18:23] Community and DevRel 
• [00:25:41] How to Start a Community 
• [00:29:47] Technical Community Builders 
• [00:31:04] Social Media Managers 
• [00:33:14] North Star Metric 
• [00:39:20] Product DevRel 
• [00:40:37] Finding Great DevRels 
• [00:43:47] DevRel for Dev Platforms of non-DevTools companies 
• [00:46:38] DevRel Tooling 

Transcript
 

[00:00:00] Sai Senthilkumar: My name is Sai and I'm at Redpoint investing primarily in B2B software with a focus on developer oriented business. I'm very excited to be chatting with Shawn Wang today about the importance of developer relations for any company selling to developers. 

You know, we find that several developer companies we work with today are hiring for diverse leaders and oftentimes it's function gets overlooked early. Or maybe not built out soon enough. So today we'll talk a little bit more about how to structure and measure our world-class Debra organization for any startup and why it's so important for a company's overall health. 

So I'm wanting you to be joined today by Shawn, who is the head of developer experience at Temporal. Shawn, do you want to briefly introduce yourself?  

[00:00:39] swyx: Yeah. Hi everyone. I am Shawn Swyx online as well. I guess my dev role ex experience starts at Netlify where I was the second DevRel hire. And we grew from about 30 ish people when I joined to about 250. 

And. I think something like 300,000 developers to 1.5 million. And then we, and then I left in 2020 to go to Amazon where he spent a year working at amplify and thinking about AWS level or branded Daryl. And we can talk about what it's like to work at. You know, a series B to C stage company. 

The rail versus a big company devil. And then I joined Temporal this year in in February to head up developer experience. And we're a series, a company focused on microservice orchestration, which is a bundle of words, but basically we're reinventing asynchronous programming. And if that doesn't hook your interest, I don't know what will, so I'm happy to talk more about that. 

[00:01:42] What is DevRel? 
 

[00:01:42] Sai Senthilkumar: Awesome. So is that Shawn is the, is the guy to speak with, in terms of structuring and starting out in Beverly also Shawn, I guess starting with the basics here, you know, many people wrote in asking for clarity around the devil row. So, so in your, in your mind, what is Deborah and the various roles and responsible. 

[00:02:04] swyx: In what is dev route and the various rules and responsibilities. Okay. There a very big question. So dev REL I think is essentially for a lot of people is essentially rebranded marketing. Developers. Don't like to be marketed to every time you hire a professional marketer and you get them to talk at developers, their eyes glaze over and they're turned off by your marketing buzzwords and your emphasis benefits over features because you refuse to talk about how things work because marketers don't know how things work. 

Cause they're not technical. You hire developer relations before. Developers want to be spoken to by other developers. And they want to be explained on how to use things, why, and not to be handheld too much to do some hand hand-holding, but not to do too much handholding that you restrict their creativity. 

Because I think some of the best DevRel programs have often just said, we can't wait to see what you build, which is a very cliched term in Debra. It's actually, it's pretty true. If you talk to the early Twilio, derails, they just held hackathons and they're like weird a communications layer. What can you come up with? 

And they are often impressed in a lot of their new products direction comes from the, the stuff that developers want to take their product in. And so Val is very much of a bottom line. Developer first marketing efforts. And I personally segments the growing sub specialties that devel into three set, three segments, which is community content and products. 

The reason I add products in there, which is not a very common thing to, to emphasize with Daryl is because developer relations has. Background or backstory as developer evangelism, which is kind of the old Microsoft slash Google name for it, which is essentially you hire professional influencers to travel the world and give talks. 

And it's very us to the rest of the world. Like I'm pre. The good word, which is very nice because a good talk and a good useful demo or a good you know, explanation is, is actually a very important, but there's not much of a two-way street. So, it's very, it's very like us coming out to them. And I think now people understand that they, once they're devils. 

Their PR company in front of developers. And they talked to them so much that we can actually use that product feedback to feedback into the development of the actual product itself. That's the vision. That's the, that's what a lot of people say that Debra is a two way street developer. Evangelism is a one-way street in practice. 

It's more like 99% outbound anyway. And 1% inbound. The reason being that no one has time for your product feedback. Everyone has their own product roadmap. You're not proud of the PM org. You're not part of the engineering org. Who are you that I have to listen to you. So people are still figuring this out, but I think the content and community pieces REL are a bit more developed. 

[00:04:59] Where should DevRel report? 
 

[00:04:59] Sai Senthilkumar: Totally. 100% agree. And when you mentioned this in the beginning,...