What is Developer Relations?

By Burak Kebapci, Director - Developer Support

Developer Relations, also known as DevRel, is an umbrella term covering the strategies and tactics that help organizations build better products and solutions.

It’s a cycle where DevRel teams provide support and also receive feedback from developers which helps them integrate organizations’ solutions more easily and faster.

DevRel has four pillars:

• Adoption: You have to build products and tools that developers can easily adopt.
• Product building: You need a team to work with developers and build a feedback mechanism so you can get the information you need to be successful.
• Developer enablement: providing the education, tools, and infrastructure that developers need to use a product once their employer has adopted it.
• Developer perception: Developer perceptions can be a potential barrier to the product’s success. You have to make sure they have a positive opinion of your products.

Adoption:

As developers are often both users and buyers of the product, everyone is focused on how to interact with them.

“But consider a 300-year-old bank forced by law to offer open banking APIs. For this bank — in fact for most organizations — developers are just a target audience, and more importantly, an audience whose work, motivations, preferred channels, hotspots, and culture seem unconventional to those who aren’t developers. In this situation, it makes sense to have a team dedicated to relations with developers.”

That’s why teams that you have to build under Devrel such as Developer Success, Support, Experience, and Marketing will increase Developer Adoption, in addition to building a feedback mechanism to help the organization, will also help build better products and tools.

Product building:

As explained in the Adoption section above, DevRel organization is the most important part of the product building process. DevRel teams should have a close relationship with developers to understand their challenges while using company’s products and tools. This approach will help DevRel teams to identify gaps and improvements that the DevRel organization needs to make.

This is valuable information that the end user won’t be able to provide you. Let me give you an example. Imagine you’ve created an SDK and you have certain dependencies. — let’s say, Google MLKit. Do you know how to keep up with the versions? What if your customers are using the same libs and there’s a conflict between the customers’ app and your SDK? Should you use the latest version of these libraries? or Will you let your developers use the version they want? What if your SDK doesn’t support newer ones? The answer is that having a team that has close relationships with those who are integrating your products (i.e., developers) will help you create better processes and make the best decision when creating your products.

Organizations often try multiple solutions before making purchase decisions. Some of the criterias that they consider are the Integration time, maintainability, documentation, and support.

Developers may affect the business stakeholders’ decision to choose other vendors over you because of those reasons. This is why having a strong DevRel organization helps you to get developers to love your product and adopt it easily.

Developer enablement:

We can group the things needed to enable developers to use your tools and products in three categories:

• Developer experience: API design, SDKs, Sample Apps, Request builders
• Developer education: Playgrounds, documentation, tutorials, videos
• Developer support and success: A team that can support any integration needs

As you can imagine, enabling developers is necessary to ensure they give their consent to integrate your products. If they don’t, the project may end up failing. So, as a DevRel organization, you have to make sure they have everything they need to integrate your product.

Developer perception:

Understanding developer perception is also a key to success in DevRel. Have a look at this useful Information Valve diagram built by DevRelBook. (next page)

Together, the Developer Support & Success, Developer Experience, Developer Marketing, and Developer Resources functions can feed the product and engineering teams the information they need to build better products.