Five things I learned attending DevRelCon 2019
Coming away from DevRelCon this year in London I feel like I’ve been plunge pooled.
For those not familiar with DevRel it is… (I was actually trying to find a definitive Oxford Dictionary style definition…but couldn’t).
This is one of the facets that makes it such an enigma. There is a lot of context specific information and interpretation in understanding what it is as a discipline. And more opinions than you can shake a stick at!
My observations are that whilst DevRel might have been spun out of marketers trying to generate company street-cred or funnel a new audience into sales… I think really…it’s taken on a life of it’s own as a field of practice. (Again, I’m a newbie here so whilst this might be resoundingly obvious to many, I am still understanding how to quantify the domain.)
I imagine the mental image most people would paint at the portmanteau of “DevRel” is some sort of people centric role that involves talking about development. I read Christian Heilmann’s article to equip myself before the conference but even at only three years old I think his advocate/evangelist description has evolved since then (That said it’s a great article check it out here).
It does seem ever more apparent though that DevRel is so much more than running Hackathons, attending tech-events or writing Youtube guides on how to use a product…
The developer relations team gives voice both internally and externally, promoting discourse and serving as gravity for people to congregate around things they care about. Speakers at the conference put this far more eloquently and poignantly using examples of DevRel as arbitrators for inclusivity and diversity, creating communities that have gone on to create long lasting relationships with companies.
It was enlightening to talk to advocates like Olja Rastic-Dulborough and hear talks from Steve Pousty (TheSteve0) both who compounded the feeling that this is an exciting field that has only just started to hit the wider population and industry in general — with it’s potentiality still not fully realised.
So with the above said; I’ve cobbled together set of thoughts and hopefully-not-too-misrepresented-idea of DevRel that really hit a chord with me…
1. DevRel has been identified as a force multiplier within organisations, though there is no unanimous measurement of success.
I really loved the way Phil Leggetter called DevRel a force multiplier. He also described it as having amplifying properties.
I found this created such a clear mental image of how DevRel can act not just as the icing on the cake but as an activation multiplier, creating inherent value.
That said; other talks made it clear this kind of indirect benefit is by it’s nature hard to measure!
2. DevRel must constantly be invested in. Communities need to be incentivised, respected and listened too.
This was a combination take away for me from VMWare’s Richard Tomchick and Florian Gilcher. Firstly, I think the way VMWare created a persona for a community contributor was a great way to think about how to empathetically serve their needs — but also the anecdotal accounts by Florian with the Rust communities interactions with completely ignorant large organisations were painfully funny.
3. DevRel teams can be positioned with marketing/product/engineer and titles change on a per-company basis.
From the UnConf sessions, there was rigorous debate about this. I am new and ignorant of titles so I think my take away here was that DevRel is still finding it’s domain boundaries whilst the rest of the business figures out how to quantify it.
4. Modelling is a hot topic in DevRel. Everyone has an opinion, no one is exactly right.
Not clothes modelling, but data. Steve who I mentioned previously, gave a fascinating dive into becoming more professional and quantitive in how we calibrate programmes and activities.
This gave me something to think about as we are in the initial stages of our own DevRel efforts and how we can think about taking a more scientific approach.
Also https://twitter.com/hashtag/aaarrrp was completely new to me and I can see the urge to move to something other than funnel. Though I don’t really qualified to speculate what too.
5. As an emerging field within technology there is still no gold standard, we’re learning by sharing and constantly improving.
This was the overall take away from me. As this field/practice/domain evolves there will be further crystallisation and I hope one day every tech company sees DevRel as vital as using a CI/CD or version control.
Checkout some of the talks I pulled these ideas from here
I hope you found this interesting, I certainly was amazed by the talent, enthusiasm and drive at the the conference.
As an engineering director, I think the outside opinion might be that it’s an orthogonal discipline to what I should be caring about. But I’ve come away thinking about how we can internalise DevRel to help teams within our own business work better together, our challenges in creating communities internal and external, justifying and supporting those.
I also have more questions than answers so it won’t be the last they’ll see of me at #DevRelCon
Feel free to say hello to me @AlexJonesax on Twitter
