Developer relations may sound like marketing under a different name, but, while there is overlap in some goals, it is generally distinct from marketing – even when the DevRel team reports into a marketing organization. One of the core goals of DevRel is awareness and many activities focus on building awareness through participation in events, creating content and participating in and/or building communities.

However, DevRel isn’t only a megaphone for a company. Building the trust necessary for these activities to succeed within a uniquely discerning developer audience requires that a developer advocate is a trusted resource, not exclusively interested in marketing or selling – that’s the “advocate” side of the role. Successful developer advocacy doesn’t just speak to a developer community, they speak for a developer community, becoming the voice of the developer customer within the company. They work closely with product management and engineering to ensure that the needs and concerns of the developer customer are heard and addressed.

This is the ultimate question because DevRel activities are notoriously difficult to measure and there is no right answer. Since outcomes of typical DevRel activities are frequently hard to measure, some goals tend to be focused on production rather than outcomes. For example, these might measure the number of speaking opportunities or the quantity of blog posts or videos created.

However, measuring production doesn’t do a great job of illustrating the value of DevRel activities. Did those speaking opportunities lead to marketing leads or even purchases? Was a blog post successful in building awareness and growing the community? Some tools like Common Room and Orbit have been created to try to measure common DevRel activities, but even without these tools many DevRel teams come up with manual means to measure similar statistics. Still, these measurements tend to be imperfect, so a successful DevRel program tends to center goals around growth rather than headline numbers, such as increasing overall blog traffic by 10% rather than setting a goal around the traffic of an individual post.