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The countdown is on to DevRelCon London 2023! Back in London for the first time since 2019, this year’s event is made up of two days of talks, discussion sessions, networking, and socialising. Among other topics, we’ll be covering developer education, DevRel in a downturn, community data and operations, core skills, DevRel for web3, and more.
Join us to learn, share, and hang out with your fellow DevRel professionals from across the world. And to give you a taste of what’s on offer, here’s our next quick fire speaker interview.
Speaker: Ben Gamble
Company: Aiven
Position: DevRel Manager
Talk title: Building internal alignment.
A long builder of games, simulations, and collaborative user experiences, Ben has previously built a global logistics company, large scale online games and augmented reality apps. Ben currently works at Aiven, leading a team of advocates making open-source data tools accessible for everyone.
Tell us about the talk that you are planning to give at DevRelCon London 2023
At DevRelCon in London, I’m going to be speaking about building internal alignment between teams. This talk has kind of come out of my experiences over the last few years of leading DevRel teams and departments, where there’s a sort of external attitude that DevRel is this ‘magical’ thing that sits in the corner and makes ‘things’ happen. These ‘things’ are ill defined and often very poorly measured, at least when it comes to company OKRs.
A core thing I’m going to try and walk through in my talk is how we often fit into the bigger picture. How we can basically be a more integrated part of the team we’re in, and how we can leverage those around us to make our jobs easier, along with making theirs better too.
We’re often considered the ‘cool kids’ in the corner, but what we can make that ‘coolness’ rub off on those around us. Whether that be with solution architects who need someone to make a client see the art of the possible. Or perhaps pipeline generation needing content which we’ve written so they can push it out to promoted sources. Wouldn’t it be nice if one of your articles actually got some paid promotion behind it? These kinds of things happen if you have the right internal alignment.
However, in addition to that, there is a more serious side. Particularly in the era of cost-cutting and of tight budgets, being strongly aligned into internal goals and core metrics for the company means that you don’t have to second guess why you have a budget. The CFO will be the first person on your side when it comes to asking to go somewhere.
Having this on hand means that you as a DevRel team, and particularly even as an IC in DevRel, can just make things happen for you, with everyone around you nodding along and being very happy with the results. I can’t guarantee good results from some things I’m going to talk about, but I can guarantee that if you apply the right level of alignment internally, getting there will be much smoother.
Why should people attend your talk? What should they expect to take away from it?
The big takeaway for me is that we are not ‘an island’. We are one part of a larger organisation with a larger goal. Our goals have to feed into the big company goals, and their goals have to feed into ours. That is the absolute takeaway – working out how to square that circle. Looking at a pipeline growth figure or a sales figure doesn’t really mean much to many DevRels. We need to learn how to translate that over, and how we add to that.
What are you most looking forward to at this year’s DevRelCon London event?
I came into DevRel from being the CTO of my own company for a long time. I joined it just as the pandemic started. Although I know a lot of the DevRel faces online, and have spoken with some of them at conferences digitally, for me it’s about actually seeing other practitioners in this space.
DevRel is still really young as a discipline. It has come out of 4 or 5 things all at once, and we still have a lot of growing up to do. This is why it’s really important for practitioners to meet up and actually discuss the art of what we do. We need to really hone our craft for the learning of others.
To secure your space to hear Ben’s talk and more, get your ticket today. You can also become a sponsor of the event to reach the unique DevRelCon audience; get in touch.