What Can Developer Relations Teach Us About Data Storytelling & Visualization?

Developer relations is a very niche and specific role within tech companies. The people in these roles work with their own company's designers, developers, and product managers to create the best product they can by collaborating with the external developers that use their products. It is a really important part of any software creation team as it's the direct interface with product users.

What I find so fascinating is that this is done differently in tech companies than in most other environments. Most companies may sometimes talk to their customers - they do surveys, they do focus groups, etc. But they don't usually consider that a collaborative community-building effort like in developer relations.

And yet it's the truly collaborative RELATIONSHIP that makes all the difference. And it's something we can all learn from.

Lesson: Developer Relations

In this lesson I explain a bit more about what I mean by the above and why I think it's so important, before introducing our guest for this month.

Listen: Developer Relations with Mollie Pettit

Mollie Pettit has done data science, data visualization engineering, and has been deeply involved in developer relations for multiple companies in the data visualization software world. She explains how developer relations really works and specifically how the skills in dataviz helped her work in dev relations, and what she's learned in dev relations that we can learn from for our work in dataviz.

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