The gig economy for evangelists
My humble take on developer relations future after almost 11 years in at companies like Unity and King.
The glamorous life of those in developer relations often starts with a 5:55AM coffee on a morning flight. Indeed, people like me have breakfast in Stockholm, enjoy lunch in Amsterdam (if I have a long layover) and dine somewhere in Boston. The glamorous parts of this story make content that never gets old on Instagram and Twitter and are retold at rare family retreats. The less glamorous parts are discussed after a 4–5th beer with the fellow travelling crowd at yet another invite-only after-party event.
Developer advocates, technical evangelists, field engineers and all other kinds of ever travelling extravert developers are a very special breed of influencers who target programmers. People like me shape the general technical knowledge of online and offline communities to our own believes and values, or to whatever whoever pays our salaries tells us to…
We do it because developers often have both the authority and budgets to purchase software and services. Developer relations people’s job often is to ensure the programmers feel our employer’s software solutions are the best, require the least maintenance, are fun to use, help them grow professionally, feature open source aspirations and correlate to the values of the given developer community. Sales and marketing people cannot do anything similar. Unless you put a developer relations person next to them.
The more companies, big and small, corporations and startups, offload the software and services purchasing decisions onto their developers, the more developer advocates are in demand on the market. How do you market and sell to programmers otherwise?
How do you make use of an evangelist
The hard question is, though, how do you get a developer relations person. Or people? Where do you put them? Under sales? Marketing? But they’re programmers, so maybe under engineering then?
Would you want somebody with a huge community influence or rather with good programming skills? Or can you attract a rock star who has both and then invest a lot to retain him/her?
Afterwards, you’re welcome to face the KPIs question. That new evangelist burns so much money on the travels, then requires sponsorship budgets to operate and also comes to claim the salary at the end of the month. How do you evaluate the business effect of your new hire? And when is the time to start measuring that?
I can keep throwing in the hard questions for another few paragraphs. Like your new evangelist burns out in a year and takes sick leave or just becomes less active and reluctant to travel. Do you get a new one or do you heal up the one you have?
Then how do you evaluate the performance of your developer relations people at the year-end. On the quantity/quality of code? But you didn’t hire them to code. On the sales impact? But they’re not sales and refuse to take sales as the KPI, and you also feel they’re right. Shall I go on?
I am actually building a generic framework for developer relations
You know, the best sports coaches are evaluated by the number of champions their former students have raised. I feel like after almost 11 years in developer relations it is time for me to focus on a similar number.
How many developer communities have I built and left for my supported and grown leaders to take care of? How many developers have I empowered to be willing to share and teach others? How many students did I support to the way that they now feel like supporting their younger fellows?
I think I am ok with the numbers I am getting. But can I do more? Can I share all my experience in developer relations to support the upcoming wave of evangelists, advocates and whatever you name your extravert developers? I think I can. And this is one reason for me to start building a generic framework for developer relations.
Perhaps with time, many small initiatives like mine can unite into a big wave, a global movement, a school of developer relations?
I’ve left my stable and nice evangelist job at King to do developer relations consultancy full time. I help programmers focused companies to build a developer relations culture and grow or hire own evangelists. I help IT companies build internal developer relations program, facilitate information flow and programmer friendly culture.
By doing this all, I am answering a very complex question — can the evangelist be employed at more than one company? Or rather, would gig economy work for developer evangelists the same way it works for influencers or fashion bloggers.
Then we tune up the ambitions and ask — can we open a worldwide network of coworking spaces for developer relations people the similar way it works for others? Or the same way it works in this nice place in London. My humble opinion such devrel walk-in coworkings are exactly how the future of developer relations will look like.
Questions and Answers
It may feel like I am spreading myself thin and trying to bite what I cannot chew. Yeah, good thinking. But I am also trying to see the whole picture and step out of the comfort zone to detect the main industry pain points. Also the broad look and big ambitions make sense to attract investment and interest of some of you, who are still reading this text. Curious? Interested? Thinking you could perhaps help?
This long read had more questions than answers, I know, I designed it like this. Some of the answers will soon appear here as text or on my YouTube channel as videos. Some questions will take more time to figure good answers. Which is a decent reason for you to follow my Medium and my YouTube today. What if you’ll enjoy my writing next time as well? =]
