Developer relations
dev-REL
The practice of building relationships between a company and its developer community through advocacy, content, and support.
Developer relations is the function that bridges a company and its developer community. DevRel teams build trust through technical content, community engagement, conference talks, open source contributions, and direct developer support.
DevRel is not marketing in a hoodie. Good DevRel earns developer trust by being genuinely helpful, technically credible, and honest about product limitations. Developers have a low tolerance for hype. They can spot a sales pitch disguised as a tutorial from a mile away.
The function sits at the intersection of engineering, marketing, and product. DevRel teams create documentation, write sample apps, give conference talks, moderate community forums, and channel developer feedback to the product team. The best DevRel programs make developers successful with the product. Revenue follows.
Examples
A developer tools company hires its first DevRel person.
They hire a developer advocate who splits time between writing tutorials (40%), speaking at conferences (20%), engaging with the community on Discord (20%), and providing feedback to the product team (20%). Within 6 months, the community doubles and developer NPS improves.
DevRel drives product improvements.
The DevRel team hears the same complaint from 50 developers: the SDK's error messages are unhelpful. They file a detailed bug report with examples. Engineering prioritizes the fix. The next release has descriptive error messages. Developers notice and tweet about it.
A company measures DevRel impact.
The team tracks: documentation page views, community growth, developer NPS, time to first hello world, and the percentage of new users who came from DevRel content. They attribute 30% of new signups to DevRel-created content and community channels.
In practice
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Frequently asked questions
Is DevRel part of marketing or engineering?
It depends on the company. Some DevRel teams report to marketing, some to engineering, some to product. The reporting line matters less than the mandate: build trust with developers by being technically credible and genuinely helpful.
How do you measure DevRel success?
Track developer satisfaction (NPS), community growth, content engagement, time to first hello world, and attribution of signups to DevRel activities. No single metric captures DevRel impact. Use a dashboard of 4-6 metrics that together show whether developers are more successful.
Related terms
Representing developer interests within a company while helping developers succeed with the company's products.
How easy, productive, and enjoyable it is for developers to use a product, from documentation to API design to error messages.
A group of developers who use a product and connect with each other to share knowledge, solve problems, and provide feedback.
A formal program that recognizes and empowers the most active and influential developers in a product's community.
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