Realizing Our Impact With Other People in What We Inspire

I made a personal commitment for 2023 to write monthly, at least, on what I love doing. This month’s topic is about inspiration in Developer Relations.

With a brief and adventurous break into product management, I’ve been fortunate to spend most of the last 17 years of my career in Developer Relations. Through this work, I’ve found a range of challenges, solutions, and inspiration, across technologies and the incredible people in this space.?

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Inspiration, by definition, is a feeling of enthusiasm you get from someone or something that gives you new and creative ideas.?

DevRel is an ever-evolving field, fueled by the interest to reach and enable developers. It can emerge and thrive in many areas of a company. While we work with and rely on others to shape and ultimately ship the products and platforms we build on, our focus is always educating on the possibilities.

Like any team, group, or department requiring its share of funding and investment from the company, DevRel’s value gets measured. Like every other function in the company, what we define as success needs to clearly contribute to the overall business. However, since DevRel can live and thrive in different areas, we sometimes need to adapt how we measure its impact so that it can be as specific to the program's unique needs, maturity, and positioning as possible.

Inspiring others to build and succeed is at the heart of Developer Relations. Let’s explore inspiration, where we find it in DevRel, and ways we can measure its impact.

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Where we find inspiration through DevRel and how we can measure it

Within DevRel, we can and must find inspiration in many aspects of what we do. Here are some notable areas to find & foster inspiration in your program, and ways to apply this to your overall goals.

1) Inspiration within your team

Great DevRel teams have incredible Advocates. These are developers at heart who all seem to share a desire to teach others, often fueled by knowing that some sample code, a tutorial, or video has the potential to generate many ideas. Advocates on your team are inclined not just to teach or share updates, but enlighten developers on what can be done. Make sure to continuously spend enough time discovering new approaches to capabilities and new ways to feature what the platform can do. On developer centers and newsletters, in addition to mentioning the A-Z essentials for teaching your users, make sure this content is highlighted as “did you know,” “from the lab,” or “something to try.”?

Given enough light, and paired with the right elements, the magical and organic act of inspiration can produce tangible activity. Consider pairing most blog posts, tutorials, and videos with a proper Github project (or a place to find accompanying and well-maintained code). Whatever the content helps the developer discover should translate to that code becoming more valuable. Projects will get stars, sure, but if properly set up, they should also get forks and contributions.?

The metric here is that Advocates enlightening developers shows up in how the corresponding code gets increasing use. Make sure other groups are aware of the inventory of ideas so they make their way into newsletters, call to actions, discussions from solutions architects, and workshops. Further down the line, you should see these ideas start showing up in customer success stories and new use cases.??

2) Inspiration from other teams

When I used to consult on Platform & API strategies, my favorite question was, “What are your hopes and dreams for what developers can do with your platform?” This was aimed mostly at engineering and product teams to help flesh out their vision and what was behind them making their service/content/application available to developers.?

“Monetization” and “new business opportunity” were never the best answers. To help formulate a strategy to engage developers with opportunity, I needed to hear about the possibilities. Getting engineers and product managers talking was key to unlocking what was really behind their work: “Our app users need more ways to do this or that, so this API will help others create new experiences,” or, “With limited resources, there’s only so much we can do with our own data,” or, “Making this service available safely and securely should create new value for developers.”?

I encourage DevRel programs, especially those that might be living in Marketing or Business Development groups, to maintain ongoing and more creative discussions with product and engineering. While it’s imperative to stay ahead and informed of product updates and releases, you also need to stay in tune with the underlying motivation and potential of platform capabilities.?

Advocates talking to engineers are really developers talking to developers – within your organization. Keep the dialogue going. Discover and explore sharing code samples or examples that were used as internal POCs (proof of concepts) or for testing. There’s often hidden inspiration in what engineers and product managers went for that maybe didn’t make the ultimate “value prop” messaging.

3) Inspiration in our community

For our last example in this post, let’s explore an obvious but often untapped source of inspiration. Always look for the developers doing exceptional things. They will usually stand out.

Build relationships and maintain channels (forums, Discord, Slack, etc.) to stay connected. In most cases, they are looking for ways to inspire others, to share code, or post newly found best practices. It’s not that difficult to recognize their actions and bring a spotlight, when welcomed, to their work. I believe embracing the exceptional work of developers in a community is a key effort, if not an absolute responsibility, of a mature DevRel program.?

Great programs usually have some flavor of a "champions” program, established to recognize the top tier of contributors, experts, and leaders in the community. It’s a great first step to recognize individuals into something like this. Where it gets more impactful and measurable is not just building a roster, but sharing why each individual is recognized. There have been some great solutions for setting up not only landing pages for Champions programs, but also profile pages for each member. There, you can highlight contributions, projects, and content for other developers to see, learn from, and get inspiration.

Open up ways so existing members can mentor and refer others into the program. Reporting on the number of Champions is a great first step, but showing the growth of this special top tier of your community is another level. It speaks to the scale and health of your program, and gives developers more people, beyond your team, to look to for new ideas and ways to succeed.

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Inspiration can be very personal. Where we find it and how we realize it can be extremely unique from one individual to the next. For some, the creative energy from an inspiring idea is an electric current that transfers at the same, if not even greater, speed. For others, it may take more to catch that spark and run with it. But when it happens, for each of us, it can be such a special moment and something we then want to pass on to others.

As we consider inspiration and explore other topics here, I’ll keep coming back to DevRel being about “Relations” and relationships. Ultimately, this is why so many of our talented colleagues love their work in DevRel. We can realize our impact with other people in what we inspire.