Author: Martin Beeby
Compiled by: Zhuang Qi
Since 2010, I have worked in developer relations at three companies (Microsoft, Oracle, and AWS) in different forms. I have worked in various departments including marketing, R&D engineering, and business development. I have had various management styles and many metrics and goals, each with different priorities and expectations.
When you put all these roles together, you’ll find more similarities than differences. After synthesizing my experience, I’m sharing tips and advice about career survival and development in the developer relations field.
| 1. Every Question Can Become a Blog Post
In doing developer relations, you’ll encounter many questions from outside. They might be about the company, and then you represent your organization. If someone asks you a question with care, there are probably a thousand other people who want to know the answer too. This is the main source of content for my personal blog. If you receive an email or DM asking you a question, you can write a blog post to answer it, copy the link, and paste it to them as a reply.
Just now, you turned a 1-on-1 engagement into a 1-to-many engagement. This is the key to scaling. It doesn’t require you to put in more effort, but it makes everything you create more valuable.
| 2. Every Technical Blog Can Become an Asset
Regularly review your most popular blog posts and think about how to reuse this content in other media forms. Can you make it into a video? Can you extend it into a series around this topic? Can you create an abstract and submit it to a conference? Can you reach out to a podcast and talk about this issue in the show?
I call everything I create an asset. I call everything I do an activity. So, creating a presentation is creating an asset; delivering that presentation at an event is an activity.
Mainly includes:
✅ Writing (blogs, white papers, documentation, tutorials, product feedback, Q&A);
✅ Video (live or recorded);
✅ Speaking (presentations, webinars, events);
✅ Audio (original or third-party podcasts);
✅ Code (tutorials, sample applications);
In my workflow, blogging comes first. You might find video comes first for you, but the process should be the same. Take your popular content and find new ways to use it. I call blogs my seed content. Seed content should be something you enjoy creating and can be published quickly with minimal friction. My personal blog is usually where I place seed content.
You might feel like you’re repeating yourself, and that’s a good sign. You know your evergreen content, but your audience rarely knows. Most traffic now is transient. Only some listeners are your loyal subscribers, but the vast majority have never heard your speech or read anything you’ve created before.
A colleague once told me his goal is to publish one asset every day. It could be an answer on StackOverflow, a video, a blog post, a presentation at a conference.
What you focus on creating will be guided by what you want to achieve, but this basic rule is a good one to follow. Continuous high-quality output shows the world you’re active and engaged, which will attract people to help you build a network.
Personally, I publish about 2-3 things per week. Sometimes, this becomes part of a larger plan, marketing campaign, or blog. Generally, those things that integrate into the bigger picture and plans work better and scale larger.
By the end of the year, when I look back, often only 10 assets have truly created real impact.
You might think it would be better to focus only on creating these 10 things that really work. However, I found that’s not the case, for three reasons:
✅ Ideas I think will resonate usually don’t resonate, and vice versa. There’s no way to fully predict. This requires a lot of luck and skill;
✅ Unsuccessful content assets are a necessary path to creating successful assets. If it weren’t for 10 failures, you wouldn’t create a hit;
✅ These aren’t really failures, you always learn something. Not every asset you create needs to be viewed 50,000 times to be considered successful.
| 3. Write Your Presentation Scripts at the Beginning of the Year
I write 4-5 presentation scripts in the first month of the new year and try not to write other scripts for the next 11 months.
My presentation script inspiration comes from these 3 places:
✅ Using success stories as the foundation for presentation content;
✅ Using whitespace analysis to identify content gaps. This is usually driven by marketing data or user feedback;
✅ Reviewing my target conferences for the year and thinking about what organizers and audiences want to hear.
Throughout the year, I cherish opportunities to refine, restructure, and practice to become really good at delivering these presentations.
I often arrive in the conference city the day before and experience the local culture through walking and other means to customize the presentation content. I’ll attach photos of the city to my handouts to support points that already exist in my presentation. I’ll use local users and solutions as examples and take photos with previous speakers to strengthen the connections in between.
This idea comes from a British stand-up comedian I like, Eddie Izzard. When you watch his work, it seems like a concept or idea pops up at that moment. He rehearses very well and prepares very thoroughly, so many people think he doesn’t need to rehearse at all.
| 4. Create a Speaker Page
I have a speaker page that lists all my current presentations, plus things needed for conferences and promotion. My page includes a bio, CV, photos, and the pronunciation of my name.
A CV is essential, and I suggest you prepare an internal version too. Because colleagues will inevitably ask what you’re busy with. Try to describe what you do in about 100 words—this is a good exercise. Then have your boss review it, which also helps understand their expectations of you.
| 5. Become an Excellent Writer
I have dyslexia, but I find myself in a world that requires a lot of text. Over the years, I’ve been working hard to improve my writing, and of course, I’m still learning.
I improve my writing by taking courses. My former employers all provided some level of training, but there are also excellent public resources online, like Google’s “Technical Writing Courses.”
| 6. Become an Excellent Speaker
Public speaking is an area where I’ve improved significantly over the years. I found this is a skill that must be earned rather than learned. Others can help you in the process, but the key is the effort you put into preparation and practice.
My two favorite books on this topic are “Confessions of a Public Speaker” and “The Presentation Coach.”
| 7. Maintain Technical Proficiency
Write as much code as possible and get involved in projects. Even helping bugs enter a reproducible state helps demonstrate technical power and keeps you in good shape.
If you want to get better at writing and speaking, as I mentioned in the two points above, read and study others’ tutorials and presentations extensively, analyze what they’re doing, but also follow code examples. By paying attention to others, you can always learn something new, which will help you become an excellent writer and speaker.
| 8. Accept and Embrace Marketing
Even if you’re not in the marketing department, your function is most similar to marketing. Many people shudder when they hear this because they often confuse marketing with advertising campaigns.
Excellent marketers are worth every penny because they study the product marketing cycle and have a complete set of academic tools and processes designed to understand user needs and internalize them to make products better.
Aligning with marketers and figuring out how to build scalable feedback loop mechanisms is crucial. Developer relations links product development and marketing strategy to meet user needs. I’ve found that good partnerships and relationships with marketing lead to higher impact.
| 9. Know Your Stakeholders
This job can feel lonely, and you’re likely to be one of the smallest teams in the company. You might feel like no one knows what you’re doing, and frankly, no one cares.
I’ve found it useful to look for your stakeholders beyond direct colleagues. Spend some time thinking about who in the company needs to know what you’re doing, and who has the time and resources to help you achieve your goals.
Your most valuable assets to other stakeholders are technical content creation and representing the user’s voice. These are services you can provide to internal teams, and in return, they often help you with budget, support, and resources.
| 10. Stay Aligned with the Organization
I’m not a naturally organized person, but this job really requires it.
Building connections internally and externally requires planning and time. Creating assets requires self-discipline and self-direction.
Building an asset plan and writing down the goals you want to achieve within a year are two processes I go through at the beginning of each year. I try to have stakeholders and bosses review my plan and continuously revise it.
At a daily level, I use Todoist to track what needs to be done. I like it because I can create tasks and kanban boards simultaneously, which fits my working style.
I might write ten blog posts in a week, but I might delay publishing them, so I have 1-2 things going live every week. This gives the impression to the outside world and internally that I’m always busy. This is more effective than short bursts of intense activity and months of silence.
I spend time reviewing old content, updating, checking, and restructuring it. Because Google never stops recommending articles I wrote nearly a decade ago.
Finally
Enjoy everything you create and work hard to align your personal goals with company goals. If you really like your job, you’ll never have to work again. I’m on vacation every day because I love my profession.
Reposted from: Developer Relations »
