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Adam Kalsey

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Business & Strategy

Developer Relations as Developer Success

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19 Oct 2020

Most companies see Developer Relations as a marketing role. The job is to build awareness, recruit developers, and get product feedback.

Instead, the most important part of Developer Relations is to treat them like you do your Customer Success teams.

The primary role of your DevRel team is to enable customer outcomes. They are there to make the customer successful.

Creating developer tools, tutorials, and documentation are "one-to-many" enablers for customer outcomes. They are not targeted at a specific customer or specific outcome. These tools help developers discover self-success with your product.

One on one deep consulting with customers is another DevRel tool for customer success. By helping your customer understand what outcomes they are after and the best way to use your product to reach those, you’re enabling your customer to succeed.

Look at how you do customer success elsewhere in the company. What do you focus on? Onboarding? Adoption? Building competencies with your product? Do those same things as part of your developer relations.

Outreach, marketing, and developer evangelism are a part of Developer Relations. But the companies that are most successful with developers aren’t spending most of their time at events and doing content marketing. They’re spending most of their time making sure their developer customers are successful.

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