Episode 540: Joe Nash on DevRel

Joe Nash of Twillio's TwilioQuest discusses the role of developer relations/advocate, which is a role at tech companies in-between developers, marketing, sales, and HR. Host Felienne speaks with Nash about the skills people need if they want to become...

Joe Nash of Twillio’s TwilioQuest discusses the role of developer relations/advocate, which is a role at tech companies in-between developers, marketing, sales, and HR. Host Felienne speaks with Nash about the skills people need if they want to become developer relations, such as content development, programming, and public speaking. They also discussed what the job generally looks like, and how you can keep your programming skills up-to-date enough to remain relevant in your role.

Show Notes

• Episode 412: Sam Gavis-Hughson on Technical Interviews

• Episode 512: Tim Post on Rubber Duck Debugging

• Episode 403: Karl Hughes on Speaking at Tech Conferences

• DevRelCon 2021

• https://twitter.com/jna_sh

• @TwilioDevs Discord Server

• Papers We Love Education – @PapersWeLoveEdu

Transcript

Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine.

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Felienne 00:00:16 Hello everyone, my name is Felienne Hermans for Software Engineering Radio, and today with me on the show we have Joe Nash. Joe is a developer educator at Twillio where he helps students to learn with TwillioQuest, Twillio’s educational game. Previously, he was a program manager for GitHub education and developer advocate at PayPal. Welcome to the show, Joe.

Joe Nash 00:00:37 Hi there. Thank you so much for having me.

Felienne 00:00:39 The topic of today’s show is developer relations, and this is of course a role from your biography we know that you are familiar with, but not everyone might actually know what developer relation, what it even means. So, what does that mean? What relations do developers have with whom?

Joe Nash 00:00:58 Yeah, sure. So, I mean, this is a bit of a complicated answer, which pretty the best way to start, but I guess most simply put developer relations is business function, which helps companies reach developers — whether those developers be customers of the company, say in a developer-facing product or stakeholders; for example, if you have a developer platform like Slack, for example, where they want developers to build apps. So, in both of those cases, people who do the developer relations role are trying to help that company reach and build relationships with developers.

Felienne 00:01:27 And I think there are two terms here that might play a role. Sometimes people call themselves developer advocate, but also, we hear the term developer evangelist. Is that the same thing?

Joe Nash 00:01:38 Yes. So, this is another area where the answer is complicated. Developer evangelist was kind of the original title, and that meant someone who would go out into software communities on behalf of a company and advocate to developers and talk to developers and spread the word of the product to developers. And over the years there’s kind of been a trend change to developer advocate and that is largely honestly in my view because the word evangelist has some religious connotations that not are not necessarily appropriate for every community. But there’s also kind of been — and Twillio is an example of this — an idea that actually those are two different roles where evangelists are more about outward messaging and advocates more about bringing developers’ concerns back into the company. So, some companies do operate evangelists and advocates as two separate roles. Other places it’s just kind of a trend change where they’ve wanted to keep up with the times and choose a globally applicable word.

Felienne 00:02:32 So if we are in a situation where we have those two roles, is it an evangelist is more pre-sales and maybe a developer advocate is more helping people to actually use the product?

Joe Nash 00:02:42 Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty accurate. Yeah. Evangelists tend to be about awareness. They tend to be top of the funnel. So, helping developers understand that this company exists, and it has developer products, and what they can do with the tools. And then advocates are very often very integrated into the product feedback life cycle. So, they’ll be out with developers ensuring that their feedback gets incorporated into future integrations of the product, making sure the developer experience is good. There will often still be some — both roles will have a big education component. So, both roles will support developers in implementing the company’s solution. But yes, I think that where they play into the sales lifecycle is a very good way of looking at the difference.

Felienne 00:03:20 So why does this role exist? What do companies typically need developer advocates for?

Joe Nash 00:03:27 So mostly the — I guess the meme, the popular conception of why developer relations exist is that developers are often thought of as hard to market to. I don’t necessarily agree with this, personally, but that is the popular conception. The idea is that if you are marketing to technical people where ‘technical’ means that they’re into software, they’re into software development, you need people who have some understanding of that domain in order to speak their language in order to communicate effectively with them. And so, you end up with essentially technical marketing. And so, that is kind of where developer relations comes in. Over time, developer relations has taken on lots of other roles, and you kind of often see it essentially acting as the glue for an organization that needs to address developers where developer relations will interface with every department that interfaces with those developers and act as kind of the technical spokesperson.

Joe Nash 00:04:19 So, developer relations may get involved in marketing, they may get involved in sales, they’ll get involved in content and in product, and where they are acting as the ‘developer’ within the company. And so, it pops up in lots of places, lots of different roles, and so the main reasons a company will need developer relations is if they are pursuing developers as either a customer or as part of a platform play. So if you’re selling to developers, you need to be able to — often selling to developers or marketing to developers means empowering developers to build on top of your APIs, or your software, your SDKs. And so that means technical content. And equally, if you are doing a platform play, you want developers to build on top of your product, you need a lot of you need to inspire them to say that ‘hey, this is a place you can build your business. This is the place you can build your app on top of.’ And so that also requires a developer in the seat.

Felienne 00:05:09 So the type of companies that will typically have such a role are companies that allow developers to build upon their platforms. So, they might have, as already said, an API or an SDK. There is a place for developers to interact with their tooling, and therefore, you want to support them in doing that effectively and with joy.

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