Learnings on DevRel KPIs and Metrics
After Attending the 5th session in DevRel Uni Pilot Program
“Learning without sharing is selfish” — I remember someone once saying that to me. In the spirit of practicing learning in public, I am going to execute this idea I have. Literally write about what I learned, so others can come on this journey of learning with me together — “learn with Jackie”.
No time like the present. In that spirit, for my first post, I will write about my learnings and takeaways from the fantastic DevRel Uni class I attended today. For context, I am currently attending the pilot program of the DevRel Uni. In today’s session, we had Vitto Rivabella, lead DevRel from Alchemy. He shared his thoughts, mental models, and experience with regard to DevRel KPIs and metrics.
Developer marketing doesn’t exist?
Or, DevRels are the marketers to developers?
Both, and neither.
Vitto shared with us that every day we see more than 7k pieces of content. We are constantly inundated with things that demand our attention. So some Twitter thread saying “build with us” or “we are going to onboard the next million developers to X” isn’t going to cut it. So no such thing as marketing to developers.
But, if you build extremely intuitive tools developers will need, if you create content they will read and watch, if you offer docs that will actually explain, and if you create a thriving community that talks about it, you are effectively doing the job of the traditional marketer, i.e., marketing to the developers.
Mental Models
Vitto shared two useful mental models, which he called pillars.
One was about tech workers, which I like to generalize to knowledge workers in general. The four pillars are:
Be ruthless with your time
Always do the 10x thing first (think Pareto Principle).
Communication is everything
Play long-term games
Simple enough right? Make sense right? Like all good habits, these pillars are easier said than done. And, as my choice of the word implies, I believe they are habits. You have to keep practicing until it’s part of your usual routine.
The second set of pillars he shared was about DevRel:
Education
Community
Tools
Do things that do not scale
Some thoughts here.
When I joined the DevRel team at Dune eight months ago, my manager was telling me how important education was to our team. I didn’t quite get it because it was a conceptual idea. But onwards I went on doing educational initiatives and many other efforts that anchored on education. Eight months later, I now get it. A huge chunk of the DevRel job is to teach. We are teaching people the skills of a profession in a way. Being useful is the foundation, then comes all the evangelizing, advocating, and relationship-building.
Also, having already read books or listened to podcasts about scalability, or even just built software systems that should “scale”, first time hearing people telling me, “you should do things that do not scale”, was quite a shock. But I understand now. We are in the business to build relationships. We are in the business to facilitate the process of scaling, not necessarily directly scaling.
Lastly. Let’s also establish two types of metrics before diving into specific topics.
There are two types of outcomes, quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative outcomes have to be measured. So think views per video, downloads per week. Qualitative outcomes have to be felt. Here it’s about a vibe. It’s really not possible to measure the vibe, the best you can do is find a proxy metric.
Now, before you go, but Jackie, don’t be a data hater. I love data and that’s why I’m in this open data world and going gungho about data every day. Concrete numbers are how we don’t become biased and emotional about things. Yes, what we are saying here is not to just disregard metrics when it comes to qualitative outcomes. It’s about the framing and the mindset. Your goal for a qualitatively driven task shouldn’t to be shoot for a number — it’s rather limiting. But, when looking at longer-term metrics, the numbers should go up.
On Education
“Education is also known as the art of giving value without anything in return but expecting everything back…” I hear Vitto say these words as I type up notes in my Notion and all of a sudden, I stop typing — what is said is so true. My brain needed time to digest this.
There really isn’t much to say about the sentence honestly unless we write a full-on blog post about it. So moving on to other more concrete and concise things.
Education aims for both qualitative and quantitative outcomes. There are four types of education:
Active direct
e.g. Sitting in front of your laptop and start recording a tutorial
This is about a 1:1 relationship
Passive direct
Active indirect
Instead of 1:1, this is 1:1n
Passive indirect
e.g. values, principles, etc.
In terms of how types of educational content and how effective Vitto thinks they are:
video and written tutorials (+++)
documentation (++++)
talks and panels (+)
social presence (++)
I actually largely agree with Vitto. As much as talks and panels sound enticing, when it comes to docs to tutorials, they are just not as high of an impact I would say.
Finally, why? Why do we do education as DevRels?
Perfect top of the funnel (or external orbit?)
Massive value proposition for the users
Show don’t tell
Longest lasting ROI
On Community
Community aims exclusively for qualitative outcomes. Community efforts do not scale (and should not). Instead of scaling, they should facilitate growth.
Also, instead of thinking about community in the traditional funnel model (awareness → consideration → conversion → loyalty → advocacy), we should think about it in Orbit Model.
Web3 is a space where products are built around the community, so it’s even more critical to get the community portion of the DevRel job correct.
Vitto shared his thoughts on how to create successful communities
Be people driven
Spend quality time with your users
Network with other communities, cross-pollinate
Establish systems where users interact with each other (E.g.guilds, ambassadors, evangelists)
Reward your most active users
All the above points are golden words I would say. I concur very much with them.
If you want to access the original slide deck Vitto used in our lecture, please check out this link.
The End
If you have arrived here. Thank you for spending your time on this short journey with me. GM / GN wherever you are 🫶. See you in the next “learn with Jackie” post 👋
Great write up 🙂