DevRel specialists: The work “behind the scenes” that keeps developers happy

Everyone knows who developers are and what they do. It sometimes needs to be clarified what Developer Relations specialists (DevRels) are supposed to do. They can be seen doing things like handing out branded hoodies, holding team meetups, or coaxing an engineer into writing an article.

My name is Denis, and I have been working in IT for more than 15 years now, with a focus on DevRel responsibilities for the last few years. In this article, I will tell you who we are, how we operate, and what we can do to be of value to businesses and engineers.

As the name implies, Developer Relations are about building developer relationships. But the goals for these relationships can differ, for example, internal or external, talent recruitment or technology dissemination, promoting a developer’s brand or the entire company. Let’s break this down and find out what it’s all about.

Attracting and engaging developers

Some of you associate DevRel with hiring engineers, but that’s not it. Below, I’ll explain the concept of relations in the context of my work.

There need to be more good developers, and a financial incentive alone isn’t always enough to attract them. Many employees want to be part of a noble cause or join a big brand, take on exciting challenges, or find real opportunities for professional growth and advancement. Recent studies indicate that engineers regard a horizontal organizational structure within the company, a transparent trust-based culture, and a good technology stack as essential workplace elements.

By communicating to potential employees that inDrive supplies all these needs, we contribute to developing the technology brand. In other words, we build an emotional connection between the company and the engineers based on the necessary associations.

According to the 2022 State of DevRel Report, product development, developer education and support, and increased brand awareness remain among the top priorities of our DevRel efforts

The main tools used for this: are articles on external sites, organization of meetups, participation in third-party conferences, and other activities. Employees share their expertise with the external IT community and draw their attention in return as a token of their appreciation, strengthening the bond and the tech brand.

Integration via conferences

For example, the backend at inDrive is written in Go, and we are always open to meeting with middle- and senior-level engineers who could strengthen our Team. We’re partnering with conferences that unite hundreds of core backend professionals.

To accomplish this, the DevRel specialist will:

1. Negotiate partnership terms with organizers, select an appropriate sponsorship package, and defend the budget to their management.
2. Prepare terms of reference for the exhibition booth, devise memorable activities, and find contractors.
3. Identify and select a speaker among our employees, helping them pick a relevant topic, prepare their presentation, and rehearse their speech.
4. Attend the conference to make sure everything goes smoothly.

High-profile events help raise the brand status and gain access to the audience, but they also impose restrictions on the event format. In addition, there can be so many partners that attracting participants’ attention becomes quite challenging. And then again, there are countries where the right specialists can be found, but big conferences still need to be planned for them. It’s with these circumstances in mind that we organize our events.

Our events

A year ago, we opened IT hubs in Kazakhstan and Cyprus. Most inDrive professionals with a technical focus have moved to these countries, and we plan to expand our presence further there. With this perspective in mind, our task was to ensure that most of the local engineers knew we were nearby.

First, we found some local influencers, made arrangements to collaborate with local IT communities, and hosted several events. To spark interest among potential viewers, we experimented with formats.

In Kazakhstan, we came up with a new creative meetup format. The speaker begins to tell an exciting story about their professional life, and the audience has to guess what happened next to continue the narrative. In this way, we devised interactive reports that were useful and interesting to listen to.

We also invited speakers from the largest companies in Kazakhstan to events of this format. It turned out to be a beneficial networking

We went to Cyprus on a yacht. More precisely, that was the venue for our first event, and 150 people attended it.

This was our first inDrive event on the island and we were out to blow everyone’s mind

This and our other activities ensured that many IT professionals on the island learned about the opening of the local inDrive office within just a few months. In turn, this will make it much easier to collaborate with the right kind of people.

A survey by the largest Cypress-based IT community, The Hub, showed that at the end of 2022, our company was in the top five most recognizable brands on the island

It’s important to note that building a technology brand is a long process. More than one, two, or even a few activities are needed. So our Team is constantly thinking about new formats, looking for interesting locations, and preparing helpful content.

Apart from preparing speakers, our DevRel specialists often make presentations themselves, talking about the company’s technology brand.

Authors and Speakers

We aim to ensure that articles and speeches are released and circulated for our technology brand inDrive.Tech. But we don’t want to force anyone to participate in any event, so we should be able to:

1. Identify engineers who would like to share their expertise.
2. Create conditions for this need to arise.

This is how our in-house support program for authors and speakers, Production, existed. We use it to keep track of activities and reward our developers for generating content and speaking at events.

To diversify the program, its design is based on the theme of cinematography, where activities are called episodes. In contrast, articles, speeches, or assistance in organizing events and other valuable actions are rewarded by points, also known as “frames.” Soon we will launch a store where accumulated “frames” can be exchanged for practical gifts.

So, article after article, event after event, we manage to increase awareness of our technology brand among developers, improve their attitude towards our company, and gradually move center stage in their minds.

And when a recruiter one day suggests, for example, that a data scientist consider a position at inDrive, they should be prompted to remember this: “I once saw a report on how these guys are using machine learning to deal with hackers, and I’d be interested in working on something like that.” This is one of the critical impacts that our work can produce.

The ideal work model for a DevRel specialist

Internal goals

But in addition to the external community, there is also an internal community that includes the developers already working in the company. Our company is interested in keeping them employed as long as possible and working as effectively as possible. We can influence this by improving their developer experience. For example:

1. We are developing an engineering culture and helping the inDrive Engineer’s Manifesto to be more than just a pretty set of words.
2. We are committed to simplifying programmers’ lives by establishing or increasing the transparency of our work processes.
3. We are launching internal communities and hosting Team building activities to enable employees to exchange experiences and other activities.
4. We are celebrating the achievements and triumphs of our engineers.

All of this is designed to accelerate the pace of development efforts. It’s no coincidence that within inDrive’s organizational structure, the DevRel team is part of the Engineering Productivity cluster. By the way, it’s high time I told you more about our Team’s lineup.

The Developer Relations Team at inDrive

Currently, we have nine people on our Team. Their roles are divided as follows:

• The role of the team lead is to maintain order, deal with strategic issues, and develop the Team.
• Two specialists are involved in dealing with external events, enabling the development of engineering communities, and pursuing other projects in the countries where we have a presence, especially in Kazakhstan and Cyprus.
• Two more are focused on internal tasks organizing activities, Team building events, hackathons, handing out merchandise, etc.
• There are two editors to help engineers produce articles internally and externally.
• The illustrator & designer draw illustrations and designs merchandising sketches and stands for events.
• Recently, our Team was joined by an SMM specialist whose task is distributing content across social networks and conducting advertising campaigns.

Like the rest of the company, our work is based on OKR, i.e., we define our goals for the year, set quarterly tasks, and operate in two-week sprints. The plans may be unrelated to speeches or articles. For example, in the coming year, we intend to popularize Team First practices in 15 product teams, i.e., regularly and effectively apply tools like 1:1, Sprint Review, Retro, Performance Review, OKR Team, and Product Demo. Success will be measured through surveys of team members and interviews with leaders.

Things to tell your grandma

If I were explaining what I do at work to my grandma, I would say this: DevRel specialists are needed to attract suitable engineers to the Team or how we use technology. And to ensure that those already with us are doing a good job and have yet to make plans to go anywhere anytime soon.