In this article, Anthony Kiplimo shares his views on what roles are needed in developer relations teams.
A few years ago, I had the privilege of attending the onboarding training for Andela’s student ambassador program. It was a quite intensive two-day course, which included understanding Andela’s values and showing us how Andela has grown and introducing metrics for measuring community building. For the first time in my life, I had to keep in mind how my activities in the community affect the company I work with.
Both the company and ambassadors had a common goal: to help the developer community grow. For us, as ambassadors, the overall growth of the community was key. The company, on the other hand, focused on getting more developers to join their scholarship program. That said, as ambassadors, our biggest question was how to achieve these goals.
A key part of achieving goals is building excellent teams. Finding the ideal team to maximize return on investment (ROI) became our top priority.
I learned some knowledge in the onboarding course that has stayed with me over the past few years; I believe this may be the secret to building a great team, and I’m sharing it with you now.
In a developer relations team, three key roles are needed: evangelist, educator/facilitator, and organizer.
With these three roles in the team, you’ll have the right combination to accomplish some amazing developer relations adventures. If you’re just starting out, you may need to play all these roles yourself, but when you want to grow the team, try to understand where your strengths lie and see how to fill the gaps with people who can cover your weaknesses.
Next, I’ll break down these three roles and see what they bring to the team.
Evangelist
As the name suggests, these are the people who stand on stage, preach to thousands of developers, and give value to a tool or product built with software. They’re the company’s public relations face, attending various conferences and meetups, sharing product information, collecting first-hand feedback, and presenting killer slides with memes.
Educator/Facilitator
Standing on stage is one thing, but holding down the fort is completely another. Developers need you to have complete materials behind the product—from documentation to quick start guides. This is what educators and facilitators contribute, providing developers with backbone support so they can find their way in your product.
You’ll also find them frequently hosting technical training events and speaking at workshops and meetups. They may not be the most extroverted people, but their product knowledge and knack for making complex topics easy to digest are invaluable.
Organizer
These are the die-hard community members who know how to bring developers together. For some, this is almost a science. They’re the fuel for the community you build around your product—maintaining the community’s peace and prosperity, ensuring any problems are resolved as quickly as possible, and rewarding those who make outstanding contributions to the community.
Having super technical personalities who can teach knowledge, along with optimistic personalities, can help the team achieve balance. This sets the rhythm for the various activities that developer relations departments often participate in. According to Matthew Revell’s article on the four pillars of developer relations, these include outreach activities, community, product, education, and support.
Content Breakdown
As a community manager and organizer, you’ll often find yourself participating in offline and online outreach and community activities. Along with the community manager, evangelists also heavily participate in community activities, including meetups and conferences.
However, evangelists also need to be very familiar with the product because they may be the first point of contact between new developers and enterprise partnerships. They often become one of the pre-sales parts of the marketing funnel. To complete the loop of collecting real-time first-hand feedback and passing feedback information to the product team, evangelists feed the product team’s answers back to the community.
Developer educators, or more precisely facilitators, ultimately work mainly online, but can also have offline interactions, especially customers who want to train developers internally. Most of the work revolves around the product’s educational content.
It’s easy to see how to build your department and how each role fits into the core of developer relations. Teams built around this can help everyone understand what they need to do and set the right metrics for each team or individual.
This article is based on my own personal experience and what I’ve seen from other excellent teams. Our three-person team has already demonstrated these qualities. By understanding our strengths and personalities, it clearly helped us adjust goals and execute tasks effectively.
The real key to building an ideal team is finding people who understand each other. It might be a bit much to say this is the golden ratio for the ultimate developer relations team, but it’s a good start.
Note:
Andela is a programmer human resources company from Nigeria, Africa, founded in 2013. It delivers quality programmers to corporate clients through a workflow of discovering, screening, recruiting, and training software developers. Andela has established offline training camps in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. Programmers who have been recruited and trained will work remotely for employers.
Author: Anthony Kiplimo
Compiled by: Zhuang Qi
Original: Building a dream dev rel team
Reposted from: Developer Relations »
