How DevRel contributes to business success

Juhi: Okay, so today's talk is about how DevRel can contribute to business and to actually even have business impact by this role because half of the time all we think about is that developer is not equal to money, and that's something which I want to change via this presentation today. So before we move a bit about myself, yes. So I'm Juhi Singh. I work in DevRel at Kong, and I'm managing APAC for now. I also call myself product of a community and majorly because all of the growth I have professionally and anything which I have achieved professionally is all because of the community, because I got involved from my college days.

Yes. So what comes into your mind when I say developer relations? Anyone that first word which comes to your mind? Nothing. Marketing. Okay. Okay. Anybody else who would like to add?

Okay. I'll just give you a bit of brief. Generally, devils are seen as a public facing role, right? Where you are travelling from one country to another country, you are creating videos, you are writing blocks, you are organising meetups, you are going to conferences and talking about the solution. But what we don't realise is that we do so many things, right? It depends from company to company. If it's a developer first company, you might be doing something else. If it's a developer plus company, you would be doing something else.

But the one thing which we all agree upon is that as a DevRel, you wear so many hats. Some company makes you do sales, some company makes you do marketing.

Some company makes you do a lot of engineering work where you're creating sample codes and a lot of stuff. So we wear so many hats. Yet when the market was down, one of the first job or the function which got impacted was DevRel. And hence this image where anytime when there is a market down or there is a crunch on budget, the first word which we hear is get out to the devils because everybody feels that we do not bring any sort of revenue to business. Now, this is the harsh reality, but anybody has any idea that when you are doing so many things for a company, why our job was the one which got impacted? Anybody? Why do you think that happened? That de job got impacted the most during layoffs.

Okay? Yes, yes. So majorly what happens, all the devil professional, you would see them either they're a community person to believe in the power of a community or they're developer at core, right? So most of the time we end up empathising a lot with the community and developers, and for us it's always about community and developer first, anything which we are doing, what value is it bringing to a developer and a community? And it's not just us, it's also the companies who are hiring for this role. 90% of the companies, they have zero idea on why do they need DevRel function in the first place. Generally what they do is they hire one DevRel person. That de person goes and does a lot of research, creates the strategy, prepare the roadmap.

You do all the research, you create the strategy, and when you go back to the leadership team to present that this is what devil should do, either they're not aligned and then sometimes it does not become priority.

Saying that these are not the objective and priority of the company right now, but there is a huge gap. How come Community objectives cannot be similar to business objectives? How can business objective can become a priority and community objectives can be deprioritized? I think it happens because a lot of the leadership team and we as a people who are representing DevRel, we feel that they are different, which is not the case, right? It is the same. So from 2020 to 2021 when the DevRel was at boom from 2022 to 2023 when a lot of layoffs happened, one of the things I think every organisation and de professionals should learn is that understanding the value of DevRel and why they should be investing in DevRel at the first place.

So anytime, if you are applying for a company or any company who's hiring for DevRel, they should be asking why? Because DevRel is no longer just nice to have tech role anymore. You add a lot of value to the company by creating the awareness, adoption education, and as well as retaining a lot of customers and users. So you at the end do add a lot of values. So it's very important that when you're starting a DevRel function in your company, you ask that first question that why do we need DevRel in the first place? Is it for awareness? Is it for marketing? Is it for market reach?

Is it for education? What is that one purpose? Why you need DevRel in the first place? Now, I think Twilio is one of the great example for DevRel. So before we move to the metrics, what we'll go through is we'll go through a couple of case studies where we'll understand that what these people did, and then we'll focus on metrics.

So Twilio's investment in DevRel has led to a very strong brand. So when Twilio started DevRel, they knew that to enter API space and to create that awareness, they need a stronger developer ecosystem in the place. They worked on a great documentation, they created a DevRel team who went out and talked about Twilio's, and then the community which they created around Twilio became so strong that they are even till today, they are the strongest point in adding long-term growth for Twilio. At the same time, a lot of MongoDB, right? MongoDB is a very powerful technology, but to understand that technology, you need very deeper understanding of database. What MongoDB did is that they invested in early developers. When they started giving them skills, they started giving them documentations, APIs, and a lot of educational session. It had a very high value, but it was a long-term outcome.

I don't think if MongoDB had invested into students and if they were expecting the outputs in a year, the number of people who are using it took four to five years and even 10 years for them to build that market and community around MongoDB. And today it's once again, one of the strongest, right? Another good example is Stripe. I don't know how many of you know they are known for their best support system, and how did they create that? Because of the collaborative community support, a lot of users, if you go to Stack Overflow or any other places, they say that they're not choosing any other tool. It's because of the great support and the community type has, which is making them very easier to integrate into a payment gateway.

So these were couple of developer first examples by the way. And here, couple of developer plus examples. All of us, we know that Slack is not a developer first company. They have a communication platform, but then they do provide APIs integration for a lot of their users to be able to build customization and integration. What they did best is that they have a great documentation, great enablement team. They did not put so much focus on creating a Slack meetup. They did not focus on awareness. So they knew what they needed in the first place and that's why they created that very strong Slack community.

Another good example, I think the queen of community is Salesforce. I think nobody did wonders more than what Salesforce did. Now you have a whole technology role as a Salesforce developer, which a lot of companies are hiring. Just imagine if Salesforce community was not in the place, do you think their support team was big enough to be able to answer each and every question of Salesforce developers who were building on their platform? I don't think they could manage that. Even if they hire a 20 support team for platform, I don't think could give that value. What Salesforce got it from the community. They hired a lot of talent.

They created the whole role and job around their technology, and then of course the biggest value out of community was the great support and of course awareness, right?

So now we know right? There is a value and people should invest in DevRel. So if you're joining any company, first question which you should be asking, is that why they are investing in DevRel? And second question is that what value am I going to bring to the company? But every time we even as a DevRel people, we feel that we have come from different planet, we start to create a different objective altogether that this is a devil objective. It's very different from sales, very different from marketing, very different from engineering. But that's one of the biggest mistake which we do because you're not different. You're not doing anything different.

What you are doing is exactly being done in a company. You might be adding better and more value to the sales, marketing, engineering and product team. So the best way to get started with the dev develop objective is to be able to align with different functions like face marketing, engineering, and product. Go through their okage, their KPIs and try to create your objectives and metrics around that rather than trying to do it from the scratch and trying to do it all by yourself, right? Because that is another mistake, which we do, and that's when we create even a bigger gap between the business objectives and dev objectives. Right?

Now, how do you align metrics with business in the first place? Let's say that sales team and marketing team is trying to track signups. MQL sales team and marketing team is trying to sign up track MQL signups and the pipes which are being generated. What you can do is that you can also try to tie it back to all the beat up signups which are coming, all the webinars which you are doing, and you can start to track all of them into SFDC here. Once again, remember that you're not going to reach out to them for a sales opportunity. You're not going to do any sort of selling to them. All here you are doing is that you are tracking what is being done right? Yet these leads are going to be sitting very separately in your SFDC.

Nobody is going to touch, but once these leads convert into a business, it'll get added as an influenced pipe and influenced business under your OKRs and under your business objectives. Because at core, remember your goal is not to sell. Your goal is to enable and educate people, but by doing this, you are adding a lot of value to the company. And one of the mistakes which we have been doing is that we are not tracking it, right?

Another, you make sure that even when you are doing all of these things in the backend, you are maintaining that integrity of your community because there is no way you can ever sell to a community. The reason why your job role was found is to be able to create that balance between a business objectives and community objectives and developer experience, right? So that's your responsibility that you create that balance no matter what goes into your company, how much pressure you have to convert it to a revenue, you make sure that that does not get affected and impacted to a community. But at the same time, you are trying to track every single thing which you are doing. For an example, these are a couple of very high level metrics as a DevRel, which we all should track. First is that community growth where you track active users, developer advocacy, forum, forum engagement.

Then there is a product adoption, users of SDKs, APIs, integrations feature adoption in an enterprise level. For an example of BrowserStack, anytime when I was doing a meetup, we had a UTM link for people to be able to go and sign up for a free product. Once they get started with that product, it was already tracked back to a system and once they were converting into a paid customer after trying to a free trial account and then doing a university programme, we were able to track that because of meet because of community programme, we were able to convert that business or maybe influence that business into a money.

Another good thing to track is that developer education. A lot of companies who are hiring DevRel, either they have a university programme or a certification programme. For an example, if X, Y, Z companies, one developer is trying to complete a course and then another developer is coming, and then you see that with the one particular account, five people and five developers have sign up and then they have completed a certification programme. Once you track all of these into your system, your sales team gets to know that this can become an opportunity and once they go and try to sell them, it's much easier because all of these developers are already trained on your solution and the developer tools, right? Similar to GitHub's, you could see that GitHub stars are very important as a metric for DevRel, but I feel they are for the awareness because the more GitHub stars you have, the more developers are going to come and then they're going to contribute.

But another metrics which can work for the GitHub is that you see a particular company, one developer coming and cloning your project and contributing to your open source. You see another person from the same company coming and doing the same thing Once again, when you see five people, they are coming to your GitHub and trying to contribute to your open source. That's the metric which you track that X, Y, Z company, we had the five who contributed. This can become a business. Once again, these leads are not going to be touched by sales team, but once sales team goes to these accounts, they should be able to convert that and it can become your business and influence pipe for you.

Now, I think I already talked about this, vanity metrics versus the actual metrics. Most of the companies you would see that the number of impression, you have it on LinkedIn, Twitter, they ask you to track all of these social media things or maybe the number of people registered for the meetup, number of people registered for the webinar. They are important. I'm not saying that they are not, but they can never add a lot of value for you in a longer term. For an example, tracking developer retention rate reveals the success of onboarding. And how do you do that? You can do that by tools like common room tools like Orbit where you are tracking each and every activity of a developer. For an example, if somebody has written a blog, if somebody has created a YouTube video, if somebody is organising your meetup, if somebody is speaking at your event, once you start to track every single activity which is done by your community and you upload to these tools like Common Room and Orbit, you can always guide back that these are the developers and users who were with us and contributing to the community.

And then you can also show that because of that, the retention was much higher. Also, when you try to engage one person from one particular community, that person might change a company, but then that person will still have your tool as a skill, and when that person goes to another company, it can bring business to you as well. So initial days, what happened is that we did not have enough tools and hence every single thing which we did, we did not track. In the case of Twilio, it worked really well for a longer term growth because they were also very sure that why they want to invest in community in the first place. And same with other companies. But in today's generation, at least now when we have so many other tools like SFDC where you can track the whole developer journey and you can also see that how this developer has influenced the deal and how it got converted to your business, why not do that, right? So for acquisition, for retention and for awareness, you can start to track all of these into a different tool.

For an example, I'll try to summarise it in a very simple way that try to track four thing. First is that acquisition, retention, revenue growth, right? When I say acquisition, it covers your brand awareness, doing meetups, webinar hackathons in all of it. When you do IT retention, it also covers the adoption and enablement part of it because any developer and user is going to be with your solution and company when your solution is easy to use when there are a lot of videos available, when there are a lot of certification, which they can take and get started with it. And then the revenue growth is when you start to track for an example, if X, Y, Z company has purchased a low level of plan and then when you provided that skill, they understood the value of a particular feature and then they purchase that as well.

You can do all of these attribution by UTM Slink, you can do it in SFDC for an example. What we have done in Kong is that we do a meetup, we download the signup and RSVP list, we upload that to our SFDC. During the meetup, we also introduced programme like Kong Champion. We also introduced programme like Kong Academy where we ask people to go and take up the course in Kong Academy for the champion. We ask people to start contributing to who the champions by writing blog, creating videos. And anytime anybody is doing anything, we are also uploading it in the SFDC and tracking it. So you see that from awareness when you did a meetup to enablement, when you introduce them to a Kong Academy programme to advocacy where you introduce them to a champion programme and then they started contributing to your community, you have created that thread and you are tracking each and every single thing into your SFDC and common room for the engagement part of it.

Once a particular deal or particular account gets converted into a business, this will get added as your value. And hence what I have felt in my last two previous company. One of the good thing, which we haven't done anything different, we are still doing all of the community activities meetup and everything. The one thing which we have started doing is that collecting the data, and I know a lot of developers and even us, we are very sceptical about uploading those data into SFDC, that what if sales team touch it. But that's the boundary you create internally as well to make sure that this data sits with you and not with the sales team. It's not for sales team, you're not creating any sort of opportunity, you're not doing anything. You're trying to use this data to be able to track what you are doing as a value and then show it to the organisation leaders that via this meetup, via this champion programme or academy or certification programme, we were able to convert so many of our open source users to a paid customers or so many of our free signup users to a paid customers.

So I think that's all from my side. There is also reporting which tracks the same thing and half of the time the devil work and developer advocacy is about externally we representing our company. But it's also the same that you internally create that cross-functional teams where you can have a transparency where you enable sales team on how to pitch a particular developer product. You work with marketing team to create a perfect messaging copy. You work with engineering team to make sure the feedback which you have received from the users and customers you're giving them to be able to create that feature which can make their life easier. So your equation and your bonding with internal advocacy is as important as external advocacy. And yes, I think that's all from my side. I hope you all could understand the value which your function and role can bring.

And I'm open for questions. Any questions? Yes.

Audience member1: Hello? Yeah, so just wanted to know in your experience of seeing different products, but there are products which are catering to developers plus the team, which is...

It can be as good as a business intelligence dashboard can also be used by a developer in some other way. I just wanted to know example, new Relic. New Relic is also used by engineers for all the observatory aspect. Plus they are used in multiple RUM, realtime user monitoring and things like that. It's used by product and the business team as well. So how do cater between the product that is open to different genres, right?

Juhi: Yeah. So I think that's when you create the persona levels, right? So for an example of Kong as well, right? Kong, if you see we have an open source product where we are scattering to system engineers, DevOps, API developers. But at the same time, the enterprise solutions are much more effective for the enterprise companies and enterprise plan where a lot of business people are also using Kongs for analytics, also using Kong for analytics. And this is how your APIs are performing and for authentication, a lot of other parts. So that's when you define the different persona based on the product. I am not so much sure about New Relic and how other people are using it, but from a Kong perspective we always create a different persona.

One persona is a buyer persona, another persona is an influencer persona. For an example, in your case, the developers who are using the developer dashboard, they might not be the buyer persona, they can be the influencer persona and that's when you go and enable and educate them rather than selling them. But when there are business people who are using this, the value which your product and tool can bring to the business and that's the place where you can do a direct selling as well. And that's the part where sales team can manage to do that as well.

Audience member 2: Just to follow up on that, so currently I'm building a product which is not into much of the developer side, but in the finance domain that to A CEO or the CPS side. So how developer relation could be useful in this particular term. That's what I want to understand because here the ideal audience is a chartered accountant and they don't really care about what developer experience is getting into the product. So I would just like to know what is your thought on the same,

Juhi: Yeah, I feel that you do not need, so that's what I also want to understand that just because DE is the new board, you do not need to hire for an example. In your case, you can hire somebody who's just a community person and can create a community around your product. That person does not have to be necessarily a developer. But since you understand the value of community, if you want to hire somebody who's into the community space, you can. But at the same time I would say that this is not the major function. You should be focusing on hiring at an initial state start of your company. I think sales marketing or building a better product by engineering team would be much better than hiring a DevRel. That's my understanding.

But it depends on your case, the value which you see for your company, but from your use case, I don't think DE would be a right persona to hire at this stage until you create extended platform where you want developers to contribute but not at this stage.

Speaker 3: So I believe a chartered accountant re would be something a new normal for the platform.

Juhi: What

Speaker 3: A chartered accountant, like a CA relations

Juhi: Guy, I have understood one of the new term, which is called product advocate. So no longer this role is a developer advocate. You can probably hire somebody who's a product advocate and can create a lot of product advocates and create community around that. But that's the new term, which I also read very recently on internet called Product Advocates. It's no longer now, it'll not be just restricted to developer first and developer companies. It could be for other companies as well.

Speaker 3: It's more of a techno functional guy who who has a domain knowledge as well as technical knowledge.

Juhi: Yeah, I think the reason why people are focusing a lot on these kinds of roles is because these people are able to build that very stronger personal connections with the users. And I think that's adding a lot of value to the company and community and business as well. So instead of De Devil, I think the new term which can pick up is the product advocate and you can hire product advocate but not developer advocate. Anyone else? Any more questions? Alright. Okay, thank you so much Juhi. Applause.