DEV Community: Tessa Kriesel

Navigating the DevRel Job Market

Tessa Kriesel — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 19:35:29 +0000

Developer Relations aka DevRel is an ever-changing landscape as the industry becomes more widely known and evolves. The tech industry, in general, is seeing a shift in hiring prioritization and an increasing number of layoffs most recently. I’ve watched many of my DevRel peers find themselves laid off looking for other opportunities unexpectedly.

With that being said, I still believe our industry will continue growing at exponential rates as more founders & leaders begin to see the impact DevRel can have when companies target developers as one of their primary audiences. If you’re finding yourself on the job market and considering a role in DevRel, or a shift from a previous role, I’ve pulled together a few resources to help you navigate your DevRel career search.

Where to Find DevRel Jobs

I wrote a piece last year with a great list of places to look for DevRel jobs, including the following resources:

I’ve also found that LinkedIn has improved its keywords and search results around Developer Relations and found many key roles there too.

DevRel Compensation

Developer Relations compensation ranges greatly depending on the role you serve, your experience, and your industry focus. I’ve found that DevRel compensation ranges can be comparable to engineering roles—both engineers and engineering managers. In my opinion, DevRel practitioners require comprehensive skill sets, and I feel their compensation should match their capabilities. Most DevRel practitioners have some engineering experience and skills in other areas such as public speaking, social media, technical writing, education, etc., making them jack-of-all-trades (or Jill).

Two great compensation surveys have been facilitated in the last year that you can review to understand the salary ranges better.

DevRel Roles

Developer Relations has a variety of roles and career paths that are ever-changing based on what a company and team needs to succeed. However, I’ll break down a few typical roles you may see while searching job boards and sites.

Developer Advocate
Developer Experience aka DX Engineer
(Technical) Community Manager
(Technical) Program Manager
DevRel Engineer
(Technical) Outreach Manager
Technical Writer / Editor
Head of Developer Relations
Manager, Developer Advocacy
Manager, Developer Experience
Manager, Developer Education
Manager, Developer Marketing

New to DevRel? If so, some of these titles may seem foreign to you. You can leverage a slide deck I created called What is DevRel to learn more about where these roles may fit within the team.

If you’re curious about learning more about DevRel team levels, there’s a great post from Bear Douglas at Slack you should check out.

Additional Research

If you’re looking for additional insights into DevRel roles, compensation, hiring practices, and more, there are a few resources you could check out.

Interested in learning more about how to build your personal brand and find success in a DevRel career? Check out my upcoming mastermind group starting in September.

DevRel Mastermind: Finding DevRel Career Success

Join a 4-week DevRel Mastermind intended to help DevRel practitioners build their brand, land their dream job, & find career success.

Learn More

The Snapchat Minis Beta is Expanding

Tessa Kriesel — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 22:18:07 +0000

Join Our Growing Developer Community

There’s never been a better time to think big by building a Mini. Minis are Snap’s bite-size experiences that offer a wide range of utilities to Snapchatters. Minis have always been a natural way to connect with friends and foster community on Snapchat — and the network of developers who build them is growing! Our platform is currently welcoming more developers than ever to apply for the Snap Minis Beta program and, if selected, join in on the fun of creating Minis for the global Snapchat community.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about the Minis platform and what’s offered to developers through the beta program, now’s the time to dive in!

Why Minis Are So Impactful for Developers

Snap Minis are one of the most useful tools for developers to introduce their business on Snapchat. Though they may be miniature, their impact is mighty.

Over 330 million people use Snapchat every day as a way to express themselves and build relationships with others. Developers can reach this global audience by creating Minis that are easily shared among the Snapchat community. Since Minis are integrated within Chat and are discoverable via search, they can be used as a natural extension to Snapchatters’ daily conversations, enabling developers to organically reach more people.

The best part? Anyone comfortable with HTML5 can develop a Mini for Snapchat. And, since they’re built using this standard web technology, Minis work for all Snapchatters, on all devices, without any kind of installation.

There's a Mini for That

There are so many different kinds of Minis that make an impact while bringing value to the Snapchat community. For example, Gaming Minis encourage friendly competition among Snapchatters while other forms of Minis, like holiday greeting cards, TV show watch parties, or event planners, make everyday communication more fun and effortless.

Interactive Play

Gaming Minis have achieved global success and reached millions of unique players. There’s Mojiworks, which has crossed 100 million unique players across their games, with $4 million in gross bookings and revenue doubling year over year. The Mojiworks team is now working on releasing their third title after their success with “Trivia Party” and “Ready Chef Go!”

And So Many More Minis

Other forms of Minis are just as popular. Snapchatters have streamed millions of minutes of content between friends with HBO Max’s “Watch Party” Mini and have swiped through more than 5M events in the Ticketmaster Mini. Minis can even be used for special occasions, too. In 2021, Snapchatters sent and received over 2 million personalized cards through Givingli for Valentine’s Day. The following year, Givingli’s “Send Gifts” Mini inspired Snapchatters to purchase thousands of gift cards for loved ones.

One of the best things about Minis is that they’re inherently social while still upholding Snapchat’s values around individual data privacy. Using an innovative templating system, our new Minis Private Components System enables developers to code in social features like reviews, ratings, conversations, and more, making for rich social experiences while simultaneously keeping Snapchatters’ data secure.

Apply to Join the Program

The Minis developer community is getting a whole lot bigger! Learn even more about developing Minis before applying to be a part of the Snap Minis Beta program. If selected, you’ll have the opportunity to build your first Mini and unlock self-serve access to our Minis SDK and developer portals.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a part of the Minis developer program. We’re looking forward to reviewing your application and seeing what you create!

Request Access to the Beta

My DevRel Strategy Breakdown

Tessa Kriesel — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 21:23:24 +0000

I've found that most Developer Relations professionals struggle with defining strategy & measuring success. I myself have been through many strategy format revisions before landing on the best for my teams.

We don't have a magic user manual for DevRel or even all that many industry resources, even though we're all great at building resources for developers. Therefore, I wanted to share how I think about DevRel strategy and how other professionals are thinking about it as referenced in Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program.

My strategy outline usually has headers that look like this:

DevRel Objectives
Developer Products
Developer Audience
Developer Journey
OKRs & Goals
Timeline & Milestones
DevRel Programs & Deliverables
Reporting

Drafting DevRel Strategy Mastermind Group

Join a 4-week DevRel mastermind focused on finding your game-changing opportunities and delivering impactful team strategy.

We'll be covering the following topics:

Week 1: Research & Discovery
Week 2: Setting Ruthless Priorities
Week 3: Prioritizing Game-Changing Opportunities
Week 4: Measuring & Tracking Success

Learn More

DevRel Objectives

The over-arching objectives of Developer Relations is Awareness, Activation, Engagement, Retention, & Innovation. When writing your team's objectives you should consider what your team will do both now and over the next 2-5 years. Your objectives should essentially stay the same over the life of your team, but you may find yourself adjusting these over time as well.

Question to consider

What is the purpose of your developer program?

What do you want your developer program to achieve?

What value will it bring to your organization?

What value will it bring to the developers you want to serve?

What do you want from your developer program?

Example Objectives

Build programs and strategies to grow the developer ecosystem
Build and maintain deep understanding of the developer ecosystem in order to advocate for and communicate developer sentiment internally
Educate and support developers to drive success, innovation, and retention
Grow and evolve our platforms to drive increasing value for our developers

Developer Products

Within your strategy you should define the developer product offerings that your team serves and how they fit into the wider developer ecosystem. I recommend you work alongside your product & product marketing functions to define this area of your strategy.

You should ensure that you can confidently outline the product value proposition to developers as well as product market fit.

Questions to consider

What is the relevance of the product to the developer?

The benefits of the product to the developer?

How your product is differentiated for the developer over competitors?

Page 91 of Developer Relations: How to Build & Grow a Successful Developer Program

Product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s product in numbers large enough to sustain that product’s growth and profitability.

Developer Audience

Work will be easier if you have your developer audiences defined. You'll be able to associate channels, deliverables, and programs to the right audiences and make decision-making easier.

Your marketing team, especially if they have a developer marketing focus, should already have these areas defined as it's imperative for successful marketing. However, if your marketing team does not have defined segmentations, personas, & positioning, you may have to dive in and take the lead. You want to ensure the entire company leverages and understands the developer audiences defined.

Segmentations

Segmentations help you identify which developers are a part of your target market. Segmenting your audiences allows you to hit your audience target more easily.

There is a really great blog post on this—You're Targeting Developers. So Is Everyone Else.

Developer Segmentation Framework

Download

Personas

Personas are a way to personalize your targets and humanize them. Depending on your segments, you should define 2-4 personas.

Developer Persona Canvas

Download

Positioning

Once you have defined your developer audience, you can begin to bring together positioning that you will leverage when targeting developers.

Developer-friendly positioning should cover questions like these

What type of product is being offered?

What does it do?

How does it make a developer's life easier or better?

Why should a developer use it?

Why should a developer choose it over competitive offers?

Page 148 of Developer Relations: How to Build & Grow a Successful Developer Program

Developer Journey

The developer journey is similar to a customer journey. The developer journey map is a visualization that identifies the ideal path and experience a developer should follow.

It's a tool that helps you to think holistically about the experience from the developers' perspective. - DevRel Book

Within your strategy you should define the current developer journey map (per product). As well as clearly share what your dream developer journey map could look like. It's a great way for folks to be able to visually understand the progress you're hoping to make in DevRel.

I look at the developer journey map as a guide to many key areas of DevRel. It's a great way to track the programs you own and contribute to, but it's also a way to identify data points between each stage and touch point and develop tracking around them.

https://github.com/Apress/Developer-Relations/blob/main/developerjourneymap.png

Developer Journey Map Template

Download Dev Journey Map Template

OKRs & Goals

The folks over at Atlassian know a lot about OKRs—I strongly recommend reading this post.

There's a myth out there that DevRel is hard to track. Sure, there are activities that we participate in that are hard to track or hard to prove the ROI of (since developers need 4+ touch points before they engage). However, DevRel as a function is not hard to track when you define your strategy clearly, set the appropriate OKRs based on your objectives, and create thorough metric tracking.

The objectives of your OKRs should almost always match your DevRel objectives you defined in the beginning. You may find yourself shifting the language slightly to better speak to leaderships goals in that quarter, but they should conceptually align.

Your key results should align to an objective, and should consider your company & stakeholder objectives & OKRs too. Key results should be written with the SMART goals framework in mind. You should send bi-weekly or monthly reports to your stakeholders and leadership updating them of your progress towards your OKRs.

Don't set too many OKRs! You should have 2-4 objectives with 2-3 key results.

Example OKRs

Deflect 75% of support tickets by providing scaled support opportunities in H2
Convert 100% of support ticket topics to improvements across our one to many developer resources in H2
35% of developers launch successfully within 6 months of registration
Impact at least 25% of product features based on feedback captured from developers in H2
Improve activation—moving from evaluate to learn in the developer journey—by 25% by the end of the year

Timeline & Milestones

Timelines & milestones provides folks reading your strategy with a high-level view of your intentions and plans. I tend to plan on a quarterly basis, but the timeline below actually shows mid-quarter efforts as well.

The idea is that your milestones should align to your OKRs, and the timeline should align to the work you're committing to do to accomplish your OKRs in that timeframe.

DevRel Programs

Now it's time to dive into the work you're going to do to accomplish your objectives and nail those OKRs.

DevRel programs are where you drive impact for your developer audience and accomplish your OKRs. In this area of my strategy, I land on which programs we will launch or improve based on my objectives, and from there begin to bring together the work that we'll do.

In my strategy document I will outline the program, the objectives it accomplishes, and how it will contribute to my OKRs. I then link to a separate program plan that outlines further details around the program and project I'm planning as a part of my strategy. Leadership can get a high-level view from what I share in my strategy doc, but if they're looking for further insights, they can review my program plan.

When I'm presenting strategy to leadership I try not to commit to every bit of work the DevRel team will do. We can't speak to the ever-changing technology that we constantly have to keep up with. However, we can speak to what we plan to accomplish with some details of how.

DevRel Program Examples in Airtable

View Examples in Airtable

Reporting

Let's bust the myth that DevRel is hard to track and report ROI. There are some activities that are harder to track than others, but your team impact and OKRs should be crystal clear.

Company Goals & Metrics

You should always be tracking how your work contributes to the company goals. Establish a way to capture metrics around the company goals and where DevRel made an impact.

For example, your company may have a goal to increase users. As you're reporting on your work, ensure you're capturing the data necessary to be able to point how your team is increasing users on the platform.

DevRel Goals & Metrics

This is where you track your DevRel OKRs and how your programs are contributing to those OKRs.

You should also be continually reporting on how you're doing the following:

Drive developer awareness
Improve developer activation
Cultivate developer engagement
Strengthen developer retention
Inspire developer innovation

Activity Metrics

Activity metrics are where you track the success of your work & deliverables. Not only do they help you understand how you're contributing to your OKR's and the company's, you're also learning about how your work succeeded or didn't succeed. Better understanding which deliverables land successfully with your audiences is a key need in DevRel. You have to constantly be experimenting, learning, and trying again.

Your activity metrics may point you right towards OKR impact, while others may need to be analyzed based on the scenario. In the following example, you should be tracking the results of your deliverables (to better understand if those deliverables would work again) as well as the results of the event—leads captured (in-person & remotely).

DevRel Program: Events for Awareness

Campaign: Sponsor & Speak at ExampleConf

Campaign Goal: Capture 200+ leads at ExampleConf

Deliverables: Blog post announcing our presence at the event (lead captures), social media promotion of event (engagement & impressions), deliver presentation at event (est. heads in seats), setup & staff our sponsor booth (lead captures + convos)

CTA: Visit our booth (tracked by lead captures)

DevRel Metric: # of leads captured, leads that converted to users

Company Goal: Drive product demand

Company Metric: # of users converted

Community Metrics

You should establish metrics for your community that you routinely track against that continually speaks to the impact your community is driving. These should be included as a part of your DevRel reporting. Your community metrics should align to the goals and objectives of your community forum. Which OKR does your community contribute to?

Number of community-answered forum questions
Number of content written by community members
Number of tickets deflected
Number of active users
Number of community ambassadors
Traffic stats
etc.

If you're trying to figure out what metrics to track and how to understand your impact, check out this Airtable view where I share example success metrics for DevRel programs.

In Summary

I love building strategy docs, slideshows, writing OKRs, and making sure it all tracks back to the objectives. However, it is a time consuming process. If you're looking for a time estimate, I would give yourself 4-8 weeks to work through discovery and getting to know the company & product deeply, and at least 4-6 weeks to draft, request feedback, improve, and present your strategy to stakeholders.

Looking to dive deeper into drafting DevRel strategy and learn even more? Join my upcoming mastermind group.

Drafting DevRel Strategy Mastermind Group

Join a 4-week DevRel mastermind focused on finding your game-changing opportunities and delivering impactful team strategy.

We'll be covering the following topics:

Week 1: Research & Discovery
Week 2: Setting Ruthless Priorities
Week 3: Prioritizing Game-Changing Opportunities
Week 4: Measuring & Tracking Success

Learn More

Grab the DevRel Book

Developer Relations: How to Build & Grow a Successful Developer Program

Without this amazing book setting industry standards, this content would have been a lot more difficult to break down. I strongly recommend you buy and leave this book on your desk at all times.

Buy the Book!

What is DevRel?

Tessa Kriesel — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 18:41:32 +0000

DevRel is an abbreviation for Developer Relations.

Developer Relations is enabling a developer to be successful with your product, while aligning with your corporate goals.

- Quoted in Developer Relations: How to Build & Grow a Successful Developer Program

What is DevRel? Slide Deck

Download a Google Presentation with this content outlined in a beautiful format to present to your team or stakeholders.

Download Slide Deck Template

Business Impact of Developer Relations Programs

Drive awareness & strengthen reputation
Increase developer adoption & retention
Capture feedback & drive product innovation
Enhanced support & developer satisfaction
Increase sales & revenue
Increase code & open-source contributions
Strengthen technical recruiting pipeline

To the community, I represent the company. To the company, I represent the community. I must have both of their interests in mind at all times.

Ewan Dennis, quoted in The Business Value of Developer Relations

Developer Relations is an Information Valve

Page 14 in Developer Relations: How to Build & Grow a Successful Developer Program

Developer Relations Framework

Around the core of “Developer Experience” there are three main areas of practice:

Developer Marketing
Developer Education
Developer Success

Community plays a role in all of it

https://github.com/Apress/Developer-Relations/blob/main/devrelframework.png

Developer Experience

Also known as DX, is the equivalent of User Experience for developers. DX includes interactions with product, developer hub, and documentation. DX works closely with Product.