If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. — Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker’s often cited quote is one of the most famous quotes in business and one from my own experience as a startup founder and manager I’ve found to be very true. However, when it comes to developer relations, it is notoriously difficult to measure in part because it’s also notoriously difficult to define.
Developer relations means different things to different people and it encompasses many different tasks, responsibilities, and even resides within different areas of an organization (typically engineering, product, or marketing).
But to find success within any business, you need to be able to justify your existence. The leadership of the organization needs to understand the 10,000 foot view of the value you bring. …
Imagine you’re a developer working at Opentech Corp tasked with adding payment support to your company’s product. You start by doing research on payment processing solutions in order to make a recommendation. You first try out payment processing company XYZ Processing because you’ve seen them around for a long time and you know it’s used by other companies.
After banging your head against the wall for 2 hours to get a simple test payment working, you give up and try out company ABC Processing.
With ABC Processing you’re taken through a smooth registration flow, download an SDK for the language of your choice, and you are accepting payments within a sandbox environment within minutes. Furthermore, you want to know whether ABC Processing supports subscriptions and transactional payments, not only do they have an in-depth guide that walks you through how to set it up, but there’s also a video tutorial that takes you through everything step by step. …
For those of us that work in developer relations, we have likely experienced a situation like the following.
“Let’s start with a round of introductions. Sean, why don’t you go first?”, says the organizer of the meeting.
“Sure thing.
Hey there, my name is Sean Falconer and I work in developer relations.”
Room full of blank stares.
Even in my day job, it’s common to interact with colleagues that are unfamiliar with developer relations and externally, even more so.
Explaining your role and function comes with the territory of working in this space, but why is that? Why are people unaware of developer relations or confused about the responsibilities of those that work within the function? …
My plan for this blog is to discuss topics related to developer relations, but before I get there, I wanted to tell my story for how I found myself in this career. I’ve told parts of this story in presentations in the past, but this is the detailed version of the key moments throughout my education and career that have led to where I am today.
So, how exactly did a kid growing up in small town rural Canada find himself at one of the most influential technology companies in the world?
Growing up in Canada’s Chocolate Town
I grew up in a small town in Canada in the province of New Brunswick. New Brunswick is quite rural, roughly about 95% trees and the largest city is around 90,000 people. …
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