The author of this article, Francesca Krihely, was a senior community manager at MongoDB for three years. Recently, she joined Bowery to work in marketing, continuing to serve the developer community.
Technical evangelists are standing on an important trend.
Technical evangelism has finally become a distinct field with rich practical experience, providing a framework for future practitioners. However, many of us have been working in isolation—building strategies within our respective companies but keeping our ideas and insights confidential.
Yet, like community management, technical evangelism has not yet become a clearly defined profession. We should establish a clear definition for this profession.
Currently, we are all passionate individuals who want to make it as easy as possible for developers to succeed and provide tools for the businesses we represent. Soon, we will establish a framework that helps people understand how to encourage more people to become developers.
Why do this?
Because developers hold the key to product adoption and innovation.
Developers are creators who can bring your product ideas into people’s daily lives.
Developers can help others understand what ideas are possible, and it is the responsibility of technical evangelists to provide them with the tools they need.
Some tech giants have already started investing heavily in technical evangelism, such as Google, Facebook, Adobe, and others. We can see this as a clear signal that technical evangelism has reached an inflection point.
During my time at MongoDB, I worked closely with the engineering team to manage our technical evangelism program—developing strategies and deploying them to teams worldwide to drive product adoption and share people’s enthusiasm for MongoDB.
Over the past three years, I’ve noticed many changes in how technical evangelists work, and many of us have achieved success. I believe the next five years will be crucial for technical evangelism.
We will see fundamental changes—some of which I will mention in this article—that will further establish a clear business function that works in various types of companies and organizations.
If you’re interested in becoming a technical evangelist or want to use technical evangelism as a business strategy to build a passionate user community for your product, here are some things you should pay attention to.
5 Trends in Technical Evangelism Over the Next 5 Years
1. Technical evangelism will replace traditional marketing for developer-focused companies
As we all know, developers are a skeptical group that is not easily persuaded. Many companies have realized that to accurately communicate information to the developer community, they need specialized talent. Traditional marketing cannot win over developers, and this will become more apparent in the coming years. How can we develop an effective strategy to appeal to this special group?
If you plan to develop a technical evangelism strategy or join a team that builds developer communities, you must develop both long-term and short-term strategies. You also need to find reliable metrics to track community growth and engagement. Under the leadership of Tim Falls, SendGrid found the right metrics, and you can learn from their approach here.
Other metrics include tracking developer blog traffic, counting customer orders after events, and adjusting products based on user community feedback. There are many other types of metrics that can help you.
Every time I talk to technical evangelists, we start with one topic: how to communicate our value and impact to the company. We need to maintain open dialogue with the company both internally and externally. Although complex, there are many ways to demonstrate our value to the company.
No matter what metrics you choose, you must track them consistently and show them to investors or company shareholders during meetings.
2. Evangelists will become product feedback experts within companies
Companies will increasingly trust evangelists because we can communicate with developers and provide feedback to the company. This is already happening and will become more common in the coming years. Technical evangelists will become the primary force in this area.
Additionally, feedback mechanisms will be more deeply integrated into products, improving feedback efficiency. When using products, users will immediately participate in their improvement and development.
This means technical evangelists will continue to provide valuable feedback, and the scale of feedback will be larger than it is now. Automation cannot replace the role of technical evangelists, but it will help them take a more comprehensive view of problems, understand what changes products need, and become more strategic rather than just focused on daily work.
If you’re considering becoming a technical evangelist, it’s crucial to develop strategic vision to determine product direction and provide high-quality metrics for your team, as they need your metrics to determine the product’s future direction.
3. Technical evangelism will extend beyond hackathons and tech conferences
In the next five years, technical evangelists will no longer just participate in various hackathons and leave the rest to chance (in fact, most technical evangelists already don’t do this).
Currently, hackathons and tech conferences are still the main battlegrounds for technical evangelists. In the future, evangelists will be at the forefront of business operations. At Twitter, technical evangelists help early users, thereby improving the efficiency of Twitter’s advertising products. Evangelists act as product community advisors, collecting diverse product feedback and transforming it into understandable forms for product teams to use.
The work of evangelists often makes them “celebrities,” and many become key figures in their communities. They are like community educators, often speaking at hackathons and working alongside developers at large events and technical conferences.
In the next five years, the role of evangelists will become even more important. They will not only continue to promote products but also become mentors for early customers.
If you’re looking for an excellent evangelist, you should find someone with excellent one-on-one communication skills. If you want to become an evangelist, you must focus on improving your communication skills and developing a clear strategy for providing high-quality education and guidance.
4. Women, people of color, transgender individuals, and people with disabilities will participate
As the developer and engineering fields become more diverse, technical evangelists will follow this trend. A diverse evangelist community can represent diverse technical and engineering fields, attracting more developers to join the community. In other words, the practitioners of technical evangelism will become increasingly diverse.
We need technical evangelists to pave the way, serving as mentors and role models to guide more people into this field. Therefore, technical evangelists play an important role in making this community diverse and involving as many people as possible in the technical community, thereby triggering a social change.
For the role of technical evangelists, individual ability is the core foundation. In the future, more women and people of color will participate, enriching the tech industry workforce.
Evangelists are the key to enriching the tech industry workforce; they just haven’t fully unleashed their power yet.
5. Technical evangelists will have rich practical experience to achieve specific goals
The inflection point in the tech world has just begun—we can see it as a renaissance in the tech industry—we are documenting our practices and turning our activities into a science.
Although we cannot use formulas to summarize community growth, we can establish definitions and strategies, and summarize experiences and methods to train and educate the next generation of technical evangelists.
This means anyone has the opportunity to establish the image and face of the technical evangelist profession, which is dedicated to building communities. Anyone has the opportunity.
The Developer Evangelist event and Developer Evangelist groups from New York, London, and San Francisco have proven that the market needs people like us who are responsible for communication and knowledge sharing. I’m excited to see these groups from around the world growing, with more people sharing the methods and joys of this work through blog posts and speeches.
Conclusion
Technical evangelism has arrived, and we have proven its important impact on product adoption—not just a short-term trend or a marketing gimmick.
All community builders should realize that technical evangelists are changing the tech industry and turning their work into a science. It concerns every community builder. As we grow, we not only need to find measurable ways to show progress but also share these methods with others to build a solid foundation together.
As long as we share our experiences and practical methods, we can do better. This sharing will become a byproduct of our work, and those willing to share will become “rock stars” and “celebrities” in this field. If you are a company looking to hire a technical evangelist, you should look for someone who is willing to move your strategy in this direction.
If you want to become a technical evangelist, now is the best time to join, learn from the best, and build the prototype of the future together.
Author: Francesca Krihely
Translation: Lu Xingyun
Original: 5 Predictions for the Future of Developer Evangelism
Reprinted with permission: Developer Relations »
