What metrics should a DevRel team care about?
This is part of my series of “The State of DevRel Report”. We’ll add the link to the full list later.
None.
Or almost none.
But my precious KPI’s!
If you’ve ever worked at a big-ish company, every doc shared and Slack message sent is something like: “How does this initiative impact our OKRs?”. And normally, that’s a good thing. Engineers tend to forget the business goal and get bogged down in technical implementation details. But DevRel is the one engineering team that shouldn’t look at KPI’s directly in the eyes.
The problem with numbers
The number one responsibility of a developer advocate is to care about the health of a community. As much as some pieces of software want to convince you that community can be broken down into numbers, it just can’t. How communities and individuals feel about you/your product/your business isn’t something that can be quantified. Nor would it be helpful if it were. Imagine saying “The health of your community is an 8 out of 10!”
What does that even mean?
Someone would probably need to elaborate: “It means your community is mostly engaged with you daily and has a positive outlook, but feels overlooked in area <x>.”
But the explanation of the metric was the far more helpful thing than the number itself. Trying to come up with some algorithm to calculate the health of your community is mostly a vanity metric to show leadership that “XYZ grew by % over the last quarter!”.
The reality is those metrics don’t help a developer advocate do their job better. It’s just for leadership to rationalize the DevRel job.
So how do I know if I’m doing a good job?
As unsatisfying as this is, you’ll just kind of know when you know. You’ll start hearing things from the customer success team like “so and so said you were super helpful in the forums!” or when the sales team says “big customer X said they’re going with us because of your conference talk!”.
Your Twitter announcements will have replies like “can’t wait to try this!” and “thanks for listening to us!”. Your community groups on Discord and Slack will be active and fun.
Wait, I don’t have those things…
It takes time! Not everything will happen all at once. DevRel is a long term investment. Start by just making things that other people need.
If you notice in your developer community that a lot of people have difficulty setting up X, try creating a tutorial about it.
If you notice a lot of people are asking the same question, write a blog post or tweet thread answering that question.
Be yourself. Be helpful. If you want to build a healthy community, start by being a healthy community member.
