Facets of Developer Relations

I wanted to take a moment to categorize different types of developer relations professionals for general understanding. The idea that there is a canonical “Developer Relations” person is something that I haven’t seen in practice. Instead I have seen many people with many different strengths that approach developer ecosystem in different ways, for different reasons.

Here are areas of focus that I have seen:

• Ecosystem Managers : Partner managers

An ecosystem manager is someone who creates and manages a structured program or framework into which a large group of heterogeneous partners can be organized. This is a role which seems to be somewhat rare. It can shade technical, in that you might have someone who deeply understands a landscape of tools (say, Arm software ecosystem) and works to coordinate with these partners to inform, educate and drive adoption (as well as gather feedback) relating to some core technology or technologies.

A great ecosystem manager tends to have an extremely wide range of relations and broad understanding of dozens of different technologies as well as personalities in their ecosystem. They have the ability to persuade ecosystem partners to integrate core technologies, as well as walk them through the process and strategy to do so.

Ecosystem Managers who do their jobs well, in my experience, are able to demonstrate a clear program flow for inducting new partners into their ecosystem, matching them with internal and external individuals and developing these partners into valuable allies.

It would be very hard for me to imagine someone being an ecosystem manager without a very significant career of some sort in their particular industry.

• Developer Program Managers

An ideal developer program manager is someone who is incredibly skilled at execution and organization of spreadsheets, tracking and pipelines. A program manager has some similarities to an ecosystem manager but generally has significantly less technical depth and relationship depth with partners and there technology stacks tends to be less.

Instead, developer program managers are very good at operationalizing outreach, relationship building, delivery of strategic programs. Developer Relations at scale involves huge amounts of data processing (excel, spreadsheets, SalesForce etc). If you are trying to operate a complex program involving many partners, events, workshops and other initiatives — having someone dedicated to keeping things on track is very useful.

• Developer Advocates

A developer advocate tends to be a former engineer who produces technical talks, content, thought leadership and code. I have seen different types of developer advocates who are good at different things. Some of the advocates I have worked with were extremely good at community, and knew how to stand up and run Discord servers with thousands of members. Others have been much better at tech demos and training. Still others have had a balance of building tools and developer frameworks while also writing documentation and running hackathon events.

Developer Advocates are meant to integrate with product teams and help relay customer feedback which can be used to improve developer platforms.

• Technical Evangelists

Evangelist is a term which has fallen out of fashion because it connotes that someone is traveling around expounding about something. In practice, the primary technical evangelist at most developer platform companies is the CEO / Founder-engineer. Evangelism generally occurs when some technology represents a significant change in how people are doing things. Such an advancement requires a lot more high-level vision to be related so that customers can grasp this “wonderful new reality” we are now living in.

A great example of a technical evangelist might be Vitalik Buterin, who “evangelizes” Ethereum around the world. Although he wouldn’t describe himself this way, it is effectively the role he is doing.

• Community Managers

These are fairly straightforward. Individuals who help to manage, set up or run communities. This is an entire discipline by itself at larger scale but at smaller scale, it is often a function that is split somewhere between marketing and developer relations or ecosystem.

• Developer Relations Engineer

Generally, an engineer who is doing developer relations. A lot of startups tend to focus on these roles reasoning that hiring an engineer is always a good thing, and if this engineer can do a bit of developer work, that would be great too. Developer Relations tends to be abstract, hard to measure and hard to justify whereas “hiring engineers” is always easy to explain and support.

• “Developer Relations”

I actually break this out and deliberately put quotes around it because it seems to be a completely different role from Developer Advocate, Technical Evangelist or Developer Relations Engineer.

For example, at NVIDIA and some other FAANG companies, I see a form of “Enterprise Flavored Developer People” who have a completely unique profile from any of the other roles mentioned here. These “Developer Relations” people tend to occur at larger, scale companies and have a set of unique traits which differentiate them.

Firstly, they tend to be a lot more senior. The “Developer Relations” people I have known often program manage or direct large ecosystems at the scale of a “VP Ecosystem” at most startups. They might also manage teams of developer advocates or developer advocate engineers. Many of the ones I have known have even founded or been the CEO of their own startups.

As a result, these “Developer Relations” people are far more valuable, expensive and have a much wider range of skills which spans the gamut from marketing to community to software engineering to product management to program management.

This type of “Developer Relations” aka “Enterprise DevRel” may have once been software engineers but they often don’t write a whole lot of code anymore. However, they likely have very deep and wide technical knowledge of their domain.

I think a lot of startups confuse these kinds of Developer Relations people for Developer Advocates. They really are not the same.

• VP Ecosystem : Director Ecosystem

These kinds of individuals are technically a form of Developer Relations but also oversee partner programs, VIP programs, developer programs, developer advocacy, community and other areas. VP Ecosystem tends to have a strategy, program and delivery component and you would expect to see someone capable of putting together an overall program, roadmap and strategy to bring some technology to market which includes everything needed to constitute a “complete program.” I do not think that these folks necessarily need to be specifically technical in nature.