Tactics for staying productive and hopeful in tough DevRel times

Katie: Hello? Hello, I'm Katie. This is Sean. I'm not going to repeat that title, but if someone can say it to me three times fast at the happy hour without mistakes, you'll earn a fist bump from me. So I think we've earned the title for the longest session title. So anyway, continuing on Sean.

Sean: Yeah, so has anybody here had to answer this question in their job? Yes, exactly. So anybody who's worked in developed relations for any length of time, especially in a leadership position, you probably have to answer questions like this. And in my time at Google, I actually had a slide deck that was titled, what is Developer Relations and Why do we Pay These People? And I would give that presentation essentially every quarter to the product and engineering leadership, and essentially anybody that we'd listen to me to reeducate them on what it is that we do, the value that we bring to the organisation and lay a lot of the foundation and groundwork for justifying our existence extensively. Now through the last couple years, there's been obviously an economic downturn. The budgets have been limited or cut, and teams have been impacted by that. And I think now as developer relations professionals, especially if you're in a leadership position, it's even more important to essentially be able to answer questions like this and justify our existence and essentially educate leaders so that they don't just purely see us as a cost centre or duplicative in some fashion.

And today what we're going to do, Katie and I, is share some stories and lessons learned along our journey working both with startups and large organisations and how we sort of navigate that political landscape and things that have worked for us effectively. There's been a lot of talks based on frameworks and KPIs and metrics driven ways of essentially proving our existence, which are fabulous. This talk is not really about that. It's more about stories and things that have been successful for us, I guess. There we go. Yep, we're good. So the state of the world, so as I mentioned, there's been a downturn. Lots of people have been impacted even outside of developed relations. And with that, essentially the Twitter sphere or the formerly known social network known as Twitter has been a buzz. And even in the best of times, Twitter can be a place that's maybe not the most friendly environment to be part of, and it can be take its toll on us. But over the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of people that maybe we know maybe ourselves, and essentially functions be impacted by this downturn and it can become a very negative place to live. But I do think that despite that downturn, there is a lot of good things that come out of essentially limited resources. And we'll talk about some of those things today in terms of the things that we've learned and have been effective for us with utilising essentially limited capacity. So

Katie: We had a look at the sentiment and what's some of the data that validates the sentiment that we're all feeling. So the first thing I did is I took a look at what's happening with spend. So we all are at companies that make and sell technology. So the question is, are people buying that technology, which essentially funds our jobs? There's some cautious optimism this year spend is forecasted to go up, which is good-ish, it's a little bit back loaded. Good news is we're now in the second half of the year, so hopefully we're actually starting to see some of that backloaded spend happen. And yet there still is some caution, there is a little bit of hedging, there is a little bit of scrutiny. Instead of making large long-term commitments, budgets are being reevaluated quarter over quarter. In addition, there's not surprisingly more nimbleness and flexibility in those small medium customers than in some of those larger customers.

So it's not all sunshine and roses, but things are starting to look a little bit up into the right and what does this actually mean for us as a practise of developer relations? And as you can see, this economic roller coaster has had some implications. The first is looking at budgets. So our budgets are a little bit smaller, they're being more scrutinised. For example, budgets a hundred, $250,000 and up a million dollars saw pretty significant declines over the last year, whereas budgets under a hundred thousand dollars saw increases. The second is looking at the data behind influence. And so this is digging into some of the Stack Overflow data. Executives saw an increase in reporting their influence in making decisions. Engineering managers and product managers had an increase in saying that they had no influence over decisions, and marketers actually dropped out of the top five influencers of technology decisions.

And so you actually see a lot more need to influence at the top. The third thing that we've seen is more people are independent In freelancing, we can make some hypotheses around it. It could be in combination of reductions in force, burnout and so forth. But you do actually see an increase in the number of people who are sharing that they are doing their own thing, whether by choice or by necessity. And then the final is not surprisingly year over year, the trends in terms of what's impacting our profession remain the same. Measurement is hard. We need to continue explaining who we are and what we do. So that's kind of the lay of the land. And what does this mean for us? We have less money, less job stability, more need to influence from the top down and the continuing challenge of making ourselves understood. So what do we do with that?

Sean: We give up. No, no, that's not...

Katie: We have hope.

Sean: So this isn't all necessarily bad. So if you look at economics, there's always essentially expansion and contraction. And I've been around working in the industry long enough that I've seen essentially different stages of this happening throughout my career where we have expansion, and we really saw this around between 20, 20, 20, 22, very high valuations of companies, lots of money pouring in as a consequence essentially over hiring and so forth. And then there's going to be essentially a negative reaction to that where we overcorrect and we constrict and essentially, and then we at some point sort of level things out and we're sort of still in that narrow end of the hourglass to some sense. But there is value in terms of having to deal with less resources. Some of the best companies in the history have come out of essentially economic downtime, and there's a reason for that.

So back in 2010, I founded a company and in the start of 2011, after we'd raised some money, I left my postdoc to do that company full time. And during the first eight months of that journey, myself and my two co-founders did essentially everything wrong that you can do as founders of a company that you can possibly do. We overhired, we hired people that didn't make sense to hire, but they were smart, so we'd find them jobs. Basically. We tried to sell a product before it was ready to be sold, and after eight months, we got to a place where we needed to fundraise again. And through two months of attempting to fundraise, we got to a place where we were not going to be able to fundraise. And I remember sitting in a cafe on a Sunday the entire day with my co-founders talking and discussing what are we going to do essentially?

And we came to the harsh conclusion or reality that the only course of action in order to save the company was to come in the next day and lay everybody off. And that's what we did. We came in the next day on Monday, we laid everybody off in the company, which included my closest friend at that time, as well as two people I had recruited that were friends of mine from Canada. They had just moved to the Bay Area to start their new life after getting married. They were on day two of their job. And it's absolutely one of the hardest things I've ever had to personally and professionally go through. Two weeks later, one of my co-founders quit, and then two weeks after that, the one person that we hung on to as a hire, our VP of sales that we thought we would need to keep, we found out he was interviewing with other companies.

So we fired him. And then we went to my apartment where one of the Canadian engineers was sleeping on my couch at the time. He had nowhere to live. We rehired him and the three of us basically rebooted the company from there. And it took about a year and a lot of struggle, including two months where we weren't paying ourselves, but we were able to secure new funding from a new investor, which was Andreessen Horowitz, save the company and go on and essentially run that company for seven years. And the big lesson that I learned through all this was we made our best decisions when we had nothing and we made our worst decisions when we were flush with cash because it's very easy to be like, oh, it's not that expensive. We have the money. But the muscle that you develop during those lean times is really important for building really great programmes and really great companies because you have a certain level of scrutiny, you have to evaluate every investment that you're making.

And in terms of being in a leadership position, having to make those hard decisions. Now, I haven't been in that position in a publicly traded company. I think things work a little bit differently there, but in terms of startup, it's really always thinking about how do we survive? How do we get to that next milestone? And sometimes hard decisions have to be made, but what we essentially have amongst, or what we can take responsibility for is making sure that we make those hard decisions really hard when it comes to essentially cutting our budgets and our functions and so on. And it's really our job to make people see that we aren't just a cost centre and we deliver value. So how do we do that? That's a big question. So the first thing I think is that we have to prioritise essentially relationships over followers.

This is something I always say and just right there in the name developer relations. But if you're an advocate, it's I think very easy to focus primarily on your relationship building outside of the company. And part of that's because it's part of our job is to essentially focus on building community collaborating. It's a lot of the reason why we do this job and love it, but we also need to also be building internal relationships, and not only internal relationships, but essentially internal champions. So we need to take the time to foster relationships with the sales leader, marketing, engineering, product leaders, and build those relationships, but also make sure that they understand the value that we bring to them. So not just the value that we bring to community and so on. We have to articulate our story differently because the story that you tell to someone in sales about what you can do for them is different than the story that you tell to the CTO of the company.

And that's very important so that when these hard decisions are being made, and maybe you're not in the room to help defend yourself, you've laid the groundwork for multiple people to essentially defend your existence and understand what you do. So a lot of this comes down to there we go, making them care. And in order to do this, we have to essentially lay that ground. It can't be a reactive thing. It has to be sort of a day one objective and put it in essentially words or phrasing that they understand. And this goes back to that deck that I had at Google where I carve out every quarter reeducate people, and it's easy to shrug our shoulders and be like, oh, this is so frustrating. Why don't people just get it? But it's our job to make sure that they get it. And years ago at PayPal when they were going through essentially hypergrowth, they had hired their first sort of adult head of infrastructure, this really experienced guy.

And prior to that, all the people that were running infrastructure at PayPal were really smart software engineers, but they weren't necessarily experienced in building scalable infrastructure. So his head of infrastructure comes in to the area where the infrastructure team is, and he sees all these dashboards on the wall and he's like, what are these dashboards? And one of the smart engineers there says, well, that's the software that we've developed to allow us to monitor web traffic. And then depending on how much traffic that we're getting, we'll route that to different servers so that we don't overload the server. And this head of infrastructure says, oh, okay, like a load balancer. And this guy that answered the question says, what is a load balancer? So what had happened essentially was these software engineers who were really smart, solved the problem of essentially balancing loads to the websites by recreating and software a load balancer, because they weren't experienced infrastructure people.

They didn't know a piece of hardware existed called a load balance. So that would solve this problem for them. So they used the tools that they understood to solve that problem. And that's essentially what happens a lot of times when leaders are trying to make decisions about where to make cuts. You're evaluating this thing, and if you don't understand it, it's much easier to say, well, this doesn't make sense to me, so I'm going to cut it. And most likely, the people who are leaders in your company and your CEOs and so forth don't come from a developed relations background. They probably come from some other functional area where they understand it more intimately, they have more empathy for it, and they're going to help justify the existence. So again, we have to essentially do all that work, that sort of political work to make them understand what we do and the value that we have.

Katie: Alrighty, so we've now gone through two concrete ways to break this vicious cycle, or at least to slow it down a little bit. So now I'm going to go through three examples from my own experience, which really centre around the importance of healthy cross-functional business relationships for the business side of DevRel. And you're probably like, oh my gosh, did you really just say the business side of DevRel? And the answer is yes, to be clear, when in broadening perspective, we're not saying rethink what our job is, how we do our job, it's really broadening perspective on how we think about team. It's broadening perspective on who we can work with within the organisation so we can have that mutually beneficial impact while also staying true to who we are. So the first example for broadening perspective is really about team. So when one historically thinks about team structure, they think I'm a manager.

I'm going to hire people, we as a team collective are going to get work done. So a few years ago I was hired in to an organisation to build a team and within two weeks of starting was told, congratulations, welcome to the company. You have no headcount. I was like, okay, this is going to be fun. How do I be a team of one and have the impact of a team while also not burning myself out? And so it was really thinking much more broadly and opportunistically about how to define teamwork. And I approached it three ways. The first was I had very, very limited budget and I was really intentional about how I used that budget investing in a developer-centric agency, a couple of them actually who could really be an extension of our organisation, especially focusing on things like content, social media and demos.

The second is really seeing, and at this time to clarify, was sitting within the marketing organisation. I know that varies from company to company. In this case I was in marketing, really seeing myself and DevRel as part of the same organisation and finding what were the mutual goals we had, what were the pieces of content that they were creating that really seamlessly and elegantly flowed into the campaigns we were running and where were those places that I might influence a little bit to get something new created while really leaning into the ease and impact of creating those additional pieces of content. And the third was really thinking outside of both of these organisations who were other marketing partners, pr, other functions that again, had existing processes in place that we could tap into as well as shared objectives, that by working together we could expand our impact. And so by doing this, we were able to not just keep the lights on with our programmes, but really have expanded impact within the organisation.

The second is about aligning with business objectives. And I actually love that Joyce had given that image of the thrusters kind of heading in the wrong directions. We made this slide before that, but it's the same sort of thing, which is the importance of having alignment. And this is where we need to stay true to who we are. We don't want to sell our souls, we don't want to be isolated. And yet at the same time, when it starts to creep into revenue goals, lead goals, it starts to feel a little bit icky. And so this is where it's about figuring out who holds the keys to the king or queendom for lead capture and revenue tracking and monitoring, becoming really, really good friends with them. So the example here comes from when I was running an events programme sitting within developer relations, and this was even pre pandemic times, but there was already increased scrutiny around what are you spending your money on and why?

And yet at the same time, the demands kept increasing. And so we were in a place where we really needed to be able to show that the way that we were spending our money was having impact on the business. So I became good friends with the folks who were doing a lot of the marketing operations work. Now to be clear, this wasn't an easy and straightforward path. They're like, we're resourced to do this. We don't know who you are. Why are you asking us to do more work? What are you going to give to us? And so by demonstrating that lead impact that we were actually bringing in something of value that was influencing revenue, we were able to get them to agree to capture our leads and to report out on them. And final example, going super duper quickly. So we have time for questions.

And this one is really, really close to home, which is thinking about what are the internal cross functions within the practise of DevRel? And looking at this, don't get fired. I moved into DevRel from marketing. I am a marketer in PGM clothing. I wear that proudly. And not surprisingly, there was some healthy scepticism about who I was and what I was doing. And in a tense exchange with an advocate, he's like, my job is to run fast, break things and not get fired. To which I replied, my job is to keep you employed. And it helped me come up with this framework of a distillation model, which is to make that perfect DR of whiskey or whatever your favourite proof or zero proof spirit is, you need raw materials and you need a system in process in place. And that's really how I think about the importance of those multiple functions within developer relations, which is what do advocates bring to the table and what do programme managers and business functions bring to the table?

And they had the empathy, the listening, the technical expertise, and I had process. And by recognising that we were all marching towards that same beautiful DR of whiskey, we were able to recognise those complimentary skills and be highly productive together. Now, some of these examples come from large companies and so how do we actually think about them at scale? And that's really where it's not necessarily thinking about how many heads do we need to do these things. It is thinking about what are all of those functions that we can opportunistically tap into and really that alignment around business objectives so that we can have that multiplicative effect of working together. But the most important thing is we can make the greatest demos, we can make the most compelling videos. And if we're not doing that business work responsibly, if we're not telling people about it, it doesn't really exist. And so we really do, and this goes into that theme of the maturing of the profession, is making sure that we're really showing that we're a boon to the business. And how may we do that by aligning with those business functions, whose core responsibility is doing that kind of work?

Sean: Alright, so anybody here ever worked in food service? Is this job better than that job? Yes, yes. My last non-technical job, which was in high school, was working at Subway. I was a sandwich artist, burger King. A Burger King,

Katie: Burger King.

Sean: Oh, there, yes. I still have the smell of Subway burnt into my nose and I don't think I'm ever going to lose it. This job's way fucking better than that job where I made five 50 an hour in high school, slept in sandwiches. So I think it's important to remember that we're lucky sometimes it's important to take a step back. We can really get lost in the details, sometimes get frustrated, why doesn't people understand what we do? But this is amazing that we get to do this work. And I wrote this, I put this tweet up here, which is the most viral thing that I've ever done on Twitter that I did a couple of years ago where I said, developer advocacy is simple. You just need skills in engineering, marketing, business development, product management, content creation, and be a skill communicator in both written and verbal.

After that, the job really takes care of itself. And I did that as a joke at that time because this is 2020 I think, and there was a lot of small startups that were looking to hire someone fresh out of college to basically do all this stuff at an elite level. And it was kind of funny, but this sort of glass half full sentiment of this is that we, especially if you're a developer advocate, we get to do all this stuff, which is pretty cool. We get to do, leverage our technical skills, connect with people around the world, engineers, make them care about the things that we care about, learn from them, educate them, and that is pretty amazing. Alright, well so with that said, I want to say thank you so much and I think we probably have some time for questions.

MC: Microphone. There we go. Questions question over here.

Audience member 1:

Hello, my name is Rahul. Very insightful conversation. Thank you. So one question that I'd like to ask at the end of the day, what I summarise is we are talking about the RO that we provide right now. Can we, it's food for thought. Can we quantify it somehow? Can we tailor our initiatives to capture metrics around developer relations? How do we, in your opinion, should we do that? And that way we can design our strategy and our initiatives in calculating that return on investment?

Sean: So in my experience, there are ways to do that. I don't think you can quantify everything. There's certain things that we do that, and this is true in marketing as well, you can run an event where someone passes by your booth and then eight months later they do a Google search and arrive on your website. There's no way to really track that kind of stuff. And I think there's a lot of stuff that we do that from relationship building and it makes it difficult to track. But I think a lot of it, I don't think that there's one KPI to focus on at least I think it's more of a constellation that you have to focus on. And it's important that, and I think Joyce talked about this earlier too, I forget the exact phrasing, but the wording I've always said is be careful what you measure essentially because you tend to optimise the things that you actually measure.

And sometimes that can lead to incorrect incentives, but I think you have to essentially figure out what's important to the business. So when I was at Google, I worked on a bunch of API products that were essentially conversation based in a big objective of our business unit or product unit was how do we essentially grow the usage and breadth of functionality that where people were using. So then our north star metric that we defined for our team was around API usage and feature usage. And it's hard a lot of times to necessarily say that, okay, I went and I ran this meetup and it led to X, Y, Z, but there are ways of essentially telling that story from an impact perspective. And I think when you've done some of the things that we're talking about of laying the groundwork of helping people understand what you do, then you can weave essentially a narrative. A lot of it comes down to storytelling, which we should be good at because as part of our job is telling that story of how you got to that metric, what was the influence over it, and you look at other functions like product marketing stuff, a lot of times they're also framing things in terms of pipeline influences, maybe what they're talking about. So I think a lot of it in my experience has come down to influence other on things that are basically core metrics for the business.

Katie: I think we're out of time. I have answers to it too, but you're happy to come find me afterward and I'll talk about it further. I'm happy to give another five minutes or so to questions. Are you sure? If you both want? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'll elaborate with two quick points on that. The first is organisations like slash data that focus on developer research are looking at models and frameworks around it and complex and do require some data science behind it, but they are starting to think about what are those multiple touchpoint, what is that constellation and how to put them together. On a smaller level, it is like if you do a thing getting into that CRM system is icky as it may feel, it is speaking their language, it is plugging the data into the system. And it is that way of saying if they're looking at marketing influenced pipe, what is DevRel influenced pipe, particularly for products, for example, this is coming from an example of cloud is an industry where developers and technical decision makers are going to have an outsized influence on those things. The lines blur a little bit more in terms of sales and advocacy. And so again, if there's really, really clear complimentary skills lined up, there can be portions of your job or functions that will focus on those things and be able to report back those statistics. So it doesn't necessarily take away or jeopardise the authenticity of advocacy while still giving you the data back.

Sean: I think lastly, sorry, reporting structure could also influence these things too because derell, a lot of times it could be under marketing, could be under engineering, you're probably going to report on different things under engineering than maybe you would under marketing

Katie: More questions. Got one

MC: Over here. Yep.

This is a question with regards to, I think Sean, you mentioned sort of doing more or less, and I come from music and I know there are a couple of musicians in here and we know how to stretch a dollar, like emerging markets really. Do you remember, do you have an example of when you're like, here's how we're going to do it and it's not going to cost us a lot? And I asked because we're in this sort of climate right now where everything's being cut. So how do you make it work with so much so little?

Sean: Yeah, so I mean I think that some of the things that I did at Google when it came to events, sort of the high cost stuff, we would host those at Google campuses and we had the advantage that we had the Google name and fancy offices where people wanted to come, but you could do that at significantly lower cost than renting a space or something like that. At Sky Flow, we do a lot through partners, so that way you're not taking the full burden of the cost. You might be able to significantly cut the cost by bringing in complimentary products and companies and then you're sharing the burden, but it also helps tell a more complete story, especially if you get good partners that aren't competitive essentially, then you can actually put on an even better event by weaving a more integrated story. Those are just a couple of key tactical things that we've done,

Katie: And I would say in addition to partners, community champions and so forth, thinking about that as the extended network of, I'm going to say lowercase eye influencers. I know uppercase eye influencers involves money and legal and everything like that. The second is, it's the example that I shared of looking for organisations that are essentially already trying to do the same things and the multiplicative effect. So instead of it being I want to do a thing, PR wants to do a thing, if everybody can put a little bit of skin in the game, it actually has an outsized impact. I recognise in really, really lean organisations, those two people might be the same people and that is to, I think it was Joyce's talk again, where are your people? Where are the communities at that are already starting to noodle and explore around those things and to try and get lift and leverage from them. Alright, well can

MC: We get one more round of applause for Katie and Sean? Thank you.