Developer marketing in practice

Speaker 1: Debrael gone deep dives. Yee haw.

Speaker 2: K. So developer marketing in practice. Let's bring in our our panelists. So we've got Christie Fadura. Hi, Christie.

Speaker 2: How are you?

Speaker 3: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

Speaker 2: Well, it's great to have you. And so you are director of developer community for Salesforce, but recently, you were director of developer marketing. Is that right?

Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah. I spent five years at Salesforce doing developer marketing, but I've just then allocated a brand new role to enable and, raise the voice of our developer community both internally and externally. Externally. So So I'm I'm not a community manager, but instead, I'll be bringing in my marketing practices to ensure that we are doing good justice to our developer community and helping them get closer to our product teams at the same time.

Speaker 2: Great. Thanks.

Speaker 1: Wonderful. So

Speaker 2: someone who is a developer community manager is Sue Shardlow. Hi, Sue.

Speaker 4: Hi there. How are you?

Speaker 2: Very well. Thank you. How are you?

Speaker 4: Oh, not bad. I'm still laughing at that pirate voice. I was not expecting that. There were

Speaker 3: you. It

Speaker 1: took me by surprise. No. I'm super excited to have Suze with us. Yeah. You're you're a community manager at at Redis, and you have a marketing degree and a career prior to software development.

Speaker 1: And you are also an avid community member. Susan and I actually met properly through doing the global diversity CFP day last year. And I've been you know, she's one of my favorite people in tech, so I'm so excited to have you here.

Speaker 4: I feel embarrassed now. Thanks, Ramon. That's really kind of thing to say. And the feeling's mutual as well. So, yeah, like Ramon said, I am currently developer community manager at Redis, the world's most loved database.

Speaker 4: Your mileage may vary, but that's what we think. And before that, because The UK education system didn't and still doesn't know what to do with girls that like coding, I spent a very long time working in marketing and then retrained to be a software engineer after having coded when I was a child. So actually, I think that served me quite well because when I when I retrained, I realized I didn't wanna be sitting there coding every day. So my current role gives me a really nice combo of my previous career and my newfound love of software. So, yeah, that's how I got to where I am today.

Speaker 2: Great. Well, superb. So let's bring in our our next guest, and the final one for this particular roundtable, and that's Mahmoud Abdul Wahab from WorkOS. Hello, Mahmoud.

Speaker 5: Hey. How's it going?

Speaker 2: Very good. Yeah. So, what's your what's your interest in in in developer marketing? Because you're a developer advocate currently.

Speaker 5: Oh, yeah. Just a quick intro. So my name is Mahmud or Mahmud, depends on how you wanna say it. Both are fine. I work as a developer advocate at WorkOS.

Speaker 5: So what we do is, like, it's an API company. I start out as a software engineer, and more and more, I start transitioning into creating content, and then I found out I can do this full time. So, yeah, it's been fun. Yeah. In terms of, like, marketing, I would say I'm much more focused on, like, the coding aspect of it.

Speaker 5: So playing around with tools, testing them, you know, checking and seeing that they provide the best developer experience and then educating developers on how to use it more than, like, the other side where you wanna you want to let everyone know about the tool, where you do, like, marketing campaigns, big launches. But, yeah, I would say it's, a big spectrum, but I fall like like, I would say I'm closer to kind of, like, the closer to the developer and product side. But, yeah, I'm, like, open to trying everything.

Speaker 2: Great. Okay. Thanks. Well, let's just say thank you to WorkOS as well for supporting this particular roundtable. Okay.

Speaker 2: So look. Let's let's let's kick off with a question that that I have, which is what does developer marketing look like in your particular organization? So, Christy, you represent the the largest, probably most mature organization amongst us here. So, what does developer marketing look like at Salesforce?

Speaker 3: Well, that's a I think it's an incredibly important question the way that you phrased it because every single organization it probably will look completely different as to who developer marketing reports into, where developer relations lives. In our particular case, we do absolutely have an incredibly mature community. I mean, Salesforce is twenty three years old. So our community is global. They are thriving.

Speaker 3: They're incredibly passionate. Many of them have been with us for a very long time, and a lot of them, a huge amount of them, are brand new to our community. So there is a huge amount of balancing there to, to work with people of such vast backgrounds, experiences, skill sets, levels, advancement, etcetera. So in our particular case, we are, aligned directly next to developer advocacy. And those two functions, developer marketing and developer advocacy, report into the VD of developer relations.

Speaker 3: Now we at Salesforce are also incredibly lucky because of the vast size and global nature of our community that we have, a whole team, the Trailblazer community team, who, run programs and interact on a very macro level with our community leaders all over the world, but they do it for all persona. So whether that's a business leader or a CXO level or whether it's a an admin or developer, they're all pretty much the same as far as the community team goes because they're putting into practice these global programs. Whereas with developer relations, we are, of course, just thinking about and, creating content for our developer audience. But my role is a little bit more specific because I am a really great handshake partner with developer marketing and developer relations and also the Trailblazer community team. So that's kind of how we're structured.

Speaker 3: I'm I'm still sitting on developer relations, and that's where I prefer to be. I don't wanna move any place else.

Speaker 2: So so, Suz, how how does that compare with Redis?

Speaker 4: Right. So I sit in the developer relations team at Redis, which is completely distinct from marketing at Redis. And we are very clear in our team that we don't do marketing. And I know that very it's the age old discussion, isn't it? Do does DevRel do marketing?

Speaker 4: In our organization, marketing does marketing and developer relations does developer relations. And to some extent, I think it might come from why did the company decide that they need to develop operations in the first place? Where did it come from? And in our case at Redis, we were born from originally an education team. So we were originally developer education and that came about because we created Redis University.

Speaker 4: And that's where all the well, most of the developer advocates that are in our team now started out. And then it kind of evolved more into a developer relations team. And then now we have community in there, which is my remit. So we are very distinct from the marketing team and we report into different areas. So developer relations at Redis reports into product and marketing reports into the chief marketing officer.

Speaker 4: So completely different chain of command, completely different remits. And we are quite careful in what we do as well. So we we don't we don't operate in a way that our content is marketing y or sales y at all. So there's a very clear distinction between the style that we do. And because I'm a dyed in the world marketer, I I think that's right.

Speaker 4: And I think that, you know, in traditional terms, marketing, you know, you've got the marketing mix. So the marketing department should deal with things like what does the product look like? How do we develop the product? How do we price it? How do we get it to the customer?

Speaker 4: Etcetera. Whereas developer relations doesn't make those kind of strategic decisions necessarily.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 4: We also also have a research and development department, which is separate from both of those, which I think is quite interesting because obviously that speaks to how we see the environment and how we need to develop our products. So that, again, I think is a part of marketing, which, again, some people might find controversial. But in the traditional terms, marketing is all about your product and how you develop it to make a profit and get it to your customer.

Speaker 2: Thanks. And I think this is what what's really interesting to me is and Mahmouda will come on to to you and my question in a minute. But there's something you said there, Suze, which which which made me think of a previous conversation we'd had when you were very clear that developer relations is not marketing. And I kinda know that this is one of those things that comes up all the time. But, hey, we're doing a roundtable on developer marketing, so I think we're allowed to talk about it.

Speaker 2: Why isn't developer relations marketing? Because and I'll get I I wanna color this with a with a little bit of additional sort of context. Even if you're not going out there and being all kind of shiny salesperson y marketing y sort of person, you're still either educating the market, preparing the market, helping to build awareness, bringing people into the top of the funnel even if you even if it's not expressed or measured in that way, or for more product led developer relations teams, you could even argue that what you're doing is simply just kind of mid to lower funnel marketing rather than the the the big shiny part that everyone sees. So what is the distinction, and why is it worth having?

Speaker 4: The distinction is that marketing encompasses a wide range of different things, which all come together to mean that you that you produce a product that satisfies your customer needs profitably. That's like the traditional textbook definition of marketing. And the reason why developer relations isn't marketing is because it doesn't fit completely into that. If you if you drew it out as a a couple of circles, developer relations is not gonna fit into into marketing. It's gonna be more like a Venn diagram.

Speaker 4: There's gonna be some overlap. So where the overlap sits is like you're quite right. So we probably sit at the top of the funnel, like you say, some people sit more in the middle and bottom of it. We will so if you look at, you know, classic marketing and sales theory, iida, awareness, interest, desire, and action. So we are trying to create awareness, create an interest, maybe create a bit of a desire, and create some action, but we're not necessarily getting people to hand over any money.

Speaker 4: We're more likely to be just trying to get them interested and trying to create awareness of that product. And I think it it does depend from company to company. So if you do sit in marketing, you probably are more close to the sales process. In my organization, we are not. And I think the other thing I I wanna highlight is that marketing, like I said, is a broad discipline.

Speaker 4: It looks at products, but it also looks at pricing. And pricing is the only thing in your marketing mix that's gonna bring you any revenue, your pricing strategy. It also looks at place, how you're getting your product to your customers. Developer relations doesn't necessarily have a say in that. And also promotion.

Speaker 4: And most, I would argue, most marketing departments focus on promotion, which is a very narrow part of the marketing mix. And we don't you know, so that's advertising. That's social media. That's webinars where folks have to sign up and give their details, any of that kind of stuff where you're eventually trying to get people into the sales funnel. So when people think of marketing, they really what they're thinking of is promotion.

Speaker 4: There's a huge amount of other stuff in there. And arguably, some of those marketing functions are being done by other functions in tech companies. So for example, product is a part of marketing mix. But at Redis, it's done by the product organization within Redis. And I would argue that's the same for a lot of software companies.

Speaker 4: So in some ways, marketing isn't marketing when it comes to to tech companies, but that's what I would say. The there is some overlap, but there's so much more in developer relations that isn't marketing, and there's so much more in marketing that is nothing to do with developer relations.

Speaker 3: I used to I used to clarify it as saying that I build the stage that the developer advocate could stand on, which is an incredibly simplistic way to put it. But at no point should well, in our organization, I don't really feel that our developer advocate's time is best spent by organizing contracts and signing up with venues and making sure that the landing page is built. And, you know, there's all of those 100,000 things that go into creating an event. I just want them to show up like rock stars and stand on the stage and deliver and engage that audience. Now in many organizations, you have to do it all.

Speaker 3: That's absolutely true. But that is one simplistic way of defining how developer relations is different than developer marketing.

Speaker 1: Thank you. And I think oh, sorry.

Speaker 2: No. Go ahead, Ramon.

Speaker 1: Thank you. I I was just gonna say, and I think that just speaks to how how varied this can all get, and and from from different organization to different organization. And I think, you know, seeing this example helps us being able to to create those strategies that help us move forward with our with our organizations in general. Sorry. I was just gonna ask because I'm I'm very curious to hear from from Mahmud how it is at how how does that distinction look like at WorkOS?

Speaker 5: Sure. Yeah. It's actually, the line is very blurry between marketing and developer relations. So Work OS is pretty new. It's been around for, I don't know, three years, something like that.

Speaker 5: So it's pretty fresh. And, like, the company itself is also small. So kind of like marketing and developer relations, it's kind of just this one big thing. So it's like, okay. We ship a new API, for example.

Speaker 5: We want developers to know about it. We wanna make sure that when they're using it, they're happy with it. So, technically, for me, I just, like, juggle a lot of stuff. But, yeah, this kind of like, to me, it's it's really fun. It's it's a lot of work, but I wouldn't say there's, like, clear lines.

Speaker 5: So for example, I can do promotions. I can shoot, like, ads and then run, like, campaigns, but I also do contribute to the documentation. I do talks. I build demos. So, yeah, I definitely, I see why there might be a need to have kind of, like, a structure as an organization scales, but I haven't experienced it yet.

Speaker 5: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I think one of the the the points that that's coming clear to me is that, actually, 90% of what a lot of tech organizations do is marketing. It's just that it might not be in the marketing department. And so this is why I'm so on this kind of high horse of developer relations is marketing. It's just that nobody really understands what marketing is because everyone looks like a really narrow promotional bit. And I totally get that in practice and so on, the the distinction is is meaningful and valid.

Speaker 2: But also kind of in the theory of marketing and and and so on. It it feels more like developer relations. Well, what else could it be? If it's not marketing, what else could it be? But I totally get the need to, you know, both from a cultural point of view and from a practical point of view, put a a box around the different aspects of marketing that that get done.

Speaker 3: I I think I think Sue's Sue said this really well also is that, you know, marketing is a discipline. Right? So you become you you don't just become an expert marketer from day one. You have to build those skills, and that means getting to understand how channels work, getting to understand how algorithms work, understanding who your audience is, building up a database, figuring out what their tolerances are or what channels they're on, working with vendors, working with third party agencies. There's a lot to unpack there.

Speaker 3: And our developer marketing team, they're all incredible experts in these areas. They way surpass me and my knowledge and skills. Right? So I I'll go to them and say, okay. You know, my community is saying that we should be more here.

Speaker 3: How can we get there? And they'll advise me. They'll say, in our past experience, we know this. We know this vendor and how they work. We believe we should invest this much money into it.

Speaker 3: Can you go and get budget on that? And and they help me prove the value as well as execute to the best of, the requirement. Right? Like, I like, it's very much a case, you know, if somebody says, oh, can you build me a house? Well, what kind of house would you like?

Speaker 3: Right? There any kind of house that you want. How much budget do you have? So they'll they're able to advise me, okay. I think based on what you're trying to do and people that you're trying to reach and that this particular message would be great in this format on this channel at these times, you know, looped into these themes, we can do all of these other things off the back of it to help promote that and support it.

Speaker 3: But it's not just promotion. It's really understanding the opportunities and the what it is that you're trying to achieve even if you can't really put that into the right words. And I think a developer relations function is much more about education, whereas marketing is about getting that educational message to market to make sure that there are people in that audience to hear the education, whether it's virtual, whether it's via written content, whether it's in person, whether it's via a T shirt.

Speaker 2: Well, could could we talk about what a developer marketing campaign looks like? Because I think most people in DevRel have an understanding of of what a DevRel campaign or or, let's say, program looks like or a strategic initiative. But for those who haven't come from a marketing background, what what what what does what would a developer marketing campaign look like? What what happens? How is it measured?

Speaker 2: Who's involved?

Speaker 3: Well, in our particular case, we we have we build goals into the campaign. So we look at what types of content we have. We understand where our audience is, and we work with that particular channel. But we also work with our developer advocacy team to say, hi. You know, it turns out that many people are asking for this type of content.

Speaker 3: Do we have anything already? Can we repurpose it? If not, do you think we should build it? And if so, can you fit that into your work schedule? And if so, when?

Speaker 3: So we work together in tandem. We then would set some boundaries based on the channel and the delivery style and the format that we decide is best for the content. So one piece of content might be absolutely fantastic in front of a live audience. Another piece of content might be absolutely fantastic as a YouTube short. Right?

Speaker 3: And then that YouTube short, it turns out, because we have such an amazing developer marketing team, they would say, that YouTube short can actually point to these other six pieces of content that we have. So now we have a full package to offer to our market to help educate them further and take them to that next step. So based on the channel that we wanna go with and the format and the type and the style and the delivery dates, we think that this type of budget is right, and we believe it will get these types of measures and metrics. So you set those goals, and you take it upstairs and say, we believe we can hit this with this amount of money. Can we have it?

Speaker 3: It's up to them. And then if it's not always about money. Right? It could be organic socialist as well. It could be just posting a blog post.

Speaker 3: It could be attending a conference. So it all depends on if budget is required, but you always have metrics. And so those metrics are gonna be based on benchmarking from your previous campaigns or efforts. And you then watch the campaign once it launches, and you become agile. You oh, it's not really doing well there.

Speaker 3: Let's pull this message. Let's change that message. Let's change the graphic on or the image asset. Let's chomp and change and keep very agile so that we can make sure that our, we're we're getting to our audience the way that we want to be. And that's actually what the marketing aspect is.

Speaker 3: I mean, I don't want our developer relations people again to be thinking, oh, you know, why isn't that content performing very well? No. No. No. It's not that the content isn't performing very well.

Speaker 3: Maybe we're on the wrong channel. Maybe it's not the right format for the audience. Right? It's not I don't want them to get bogged down in the, in the execution and the acceptance. I wanna make sure that it's successful for them, and that means being that marketer and understanding what the opportunities are.

Speaker 1: I've got a question, if I may. How does that how does that connect with collaborations? I'd love to know. How do how does how does how does develop is it is it a a part of developer marketing to seek out and strategize around collaborations with other developer advocate teams? Or yeah.

Speaker 1: I'd love to know.

Speaker 4: I can speak to what we do at Redis. So at Redis, we we are fully in control of that. So we reach out to our colleagues in in other dev roles teams to do collabs. But I think that's partly because we know you know, you know, a developer relations community is like. A lot of people know a lot of people.

Speaker 4: So we know a lot of people that we could collaborate with. So it's a lot easier. Our developer, our marketing team isn't as close to the developer community, and they're definitely not as close to the DevRel community. So it's I guess it's that's just the way it is. You know, we know the people, so we will collaborate with them.

Speaker 4: And we are naturally going to be the ones doing that piece of content so it makes sense for us to go and make the approach. And I think there's different styles. You know? If you ask the developer relations professionals to put together a piece of content and you ask the marketing professionals to put together a piece of content, it would look like marketing. So I think I'm not sure.

Speaker 4: I'd love to hear from anyone who's done a collab with a marketing, you know, mixture to see how that works because I can't imagine it actually.

Speaker 2: I mean, in my in my experience with a couple of clients I've worked with where I I can think of one particular ebook where it was commissioned by the marketing team. And the distinction between what would have happened if DevRel had looked after it in in marketing is that the people in the marketing team with the greatest respect to them didn't have the technical deep understanding to be able to tell that what came back from the agency was nonsense. It kinda smelled and looked okay, but once you if you actually knew the subject, then it was just kind of really those you're in uncanny valley territory. So that's that's one of the few experiences I've had. And then DevRel had to then go through and basically rewrite it because it didn't make sense.

Speaker 5: I've had kind of, like, a similar experience as well because I've seen kind of, like, what kind of, like, agencies marketing agencies that can do just they write a bunch of blog posts at once, for example. And the the issue is always, like, depth. Like, you can just see that this stuff covered is kind of, like, surface level. They may not cover a lot of, like, scenarios that a developer might run into. So that's where someone who is kind of, like, I would say, DevRel focused.

Speaker 5: So it's kind of like and someone has so, like, each type of it's like marketing and DevRel, each one of them has kind of, like, strengths and drawbacks. When it comes to someone who's a developer like, in developer relations, they should be technical. They can create high quality content. On the other hand, someone who's a marketer, they can make a lot of noise and bring a lot of attention and kind of, like, deliver, kind of, like, the content to the right audience because they have a deep understanding of the different platforms, and kind of, like, the community that they're serving. So that's why you kinda need both, really.

Speaker 5: Like, I would say, that's why you might have a super high quality piece of content that doesn't get a lot of attention. And on the other hand, you might have something that gets a lot of attention, but it's like, okay. Like, that's why you might see blog posts that do really well SEO wise. But when you read them, you're like, oh my god. Why why is this recommended to me?

Speaker 5: I'm interested in things that have a lot more depth. So that's kind of, like, why what happens is, for exam personally, for me, I wouldn't read blog posts that got recommended to me by Google, but by another developer, for example. They're like, hey. This was super interesting read. And then I would go through it, and it's like, maybe it's interactive or it's really long.

Speaker 5: And it doesn't really focus on the stuff that are, like, I don't know, having backlinks and keywords and making sure that this is optimized for search. A marketer will be very interested in this stuff, and we'll make sure that these things are included in our piece of content. Maybe they would care about in a YouTube video, it would have time stamps and maybe, like, a very long description, for example. But someone that is interested more in developer relations, they'll be like, okay. Am I providing, like, the value?

Speaker 5: Am I providing value for developers? Will they learn something new? Will this help them be more successful? That's so that's kind of, like, why, like, I would say, any company needs both. And if the company, for example, it's like it's young, it's a start up, the person that's kind of, like, leading DevRel should be aware of, like, okay.

Speaker 5: You kinda have to do everything, so you have to know both and not sacrifice one or the other because it

Speaker 1: it, like

Speaker 5: it it wouldn't like, it I would say it's very discouraging when you have a super high quality piece of content that doesn't get any attention. But at the same time, you're getting attention, but it's not the right type of attention. So yeah.

Speaker 1: Thank you. We've got a question on Discord from Eric Coletta. I hope I'm saying that right. I'm sorry. And I'm gonna read it.

Speaker 1: So a common refrain I've heard is that developers don't like being, quote, marketed to. Do you find this to be true? And if so, how do you adjust your strategies and tactics tactics to adjust to that?

Speaker 4: You hear this a lot, and I feel like, really, I don't think people mind, just people in general mind being marketed to, because that's how you find out about new products, isn't it? You know, I wanna know what the new thing from my favorite brand is gonna be, and how it's gonna benefit me, how it's gonna enrich my life. So I don't necessarily think people mind marketing, but I think a lot of people don't like being salty. And sales and marketing are closely aligned, but they're not the same thing. So personally, that's what I think.

Speaker 4: I don't think developers mind being marketed to because, you know, if they've got a pain point with your product and they're really hoping for a new feature, they wanna know that that new feature is coming or they wanna know that they're gonna have some input into the process of improving your product. And they wanna know when it's coming, wanna know how to use it and all of that good stuff. And you can count that all under like the awareness and interest piece of marketing. So, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily the marketing thing. I think it's more about sales.

Speaker 4: And I used to work with a sales team and they said that salespeople love being sold to. And I think that salespeople are probably the only people that like being sold to, but, you know, I'm happy to hear other views on that.

Speaker 3: I love that, Suze. Yeah. I'm I'm not sure I love being sold to either, but, I've been working with developers for twenty eight years now and and I I think they're naturally circumspect. Right? Like, they're they're cautious.

Speaker 3: That's all. And I think they don't like to get excited about something until they can get their hands on it and really, have a go with it, have a play with it, try it out for themselves. Additionally, just because you try something out for yourself doesn't mean it's gonna be right for your client or their installation. So I think they're naturally cautious. Right?

Speaker 3: Something might look great on screen, but how what's it actually gonna mean in day to day practice for my customer, for my users? Is it gonna cause me a lot of pain to implement this? Has it been properly tested? How can I properly test it? I think they I think they like to they love new tech.

Speaker 3: They love new features. Right? Who doesn't? Right? That's that's what makes the world go go around as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 3: But it is about the actual day to day practicalities of, can I actually build this into what I'm delivering? And I think, you know, I kinda see, Matt, you know, you and Ramon are kind of barking around this or running around this tree of, you know, how do we sell to like, do people really wanna be sold to as far as a developer persona? And I think the Orbit model really does a great job of taking the marketing funnel out, taking developers out of that marketing funnel. Because in my particular case, they don't buy or sell for me. I don't sell or buy to them.

Speaker 3: Right? I have no financial transactional relationship with my developer community, unlike maybe others on this call. So I don't have a a pipeline to generate. I don't have a revenue figure to hit, but I have great interest and care and love for my community. And I wanna make sure that we're delivering things to them that's gonna help them.

Speaker 3: So I love the Orbit model because it it puts sort of you know, it brings people closer and closer into your orbit, the closer that they are to you. And I I love that because it takes that financial transactional relationship out of the picture. And so for us, we focus on education. Now we're quite lucky because we have our own learning platform. I know a lot of companies maybe, have the similar, opportunities for their developer community.

Speaker 3: I think developers really appreciate having the that sandbox to go to plan or that, you know, developer edition. They really like that. So you could consider that a sale, but but we don't we don't consider that a sale. That's not, something that's that's interesting to our community as far as we're concerned. They wanna understand things better.

Speaker 3: They want that education. They want a developer advocate to inspire them. Right? Show me what's possible. Tell me all about it.

Speaker 3: Give me that deep dive, and then leave me alone and let me sort it out for myself.

Speaker 4: Something else I just thought of while Christy was talking was that, yes, developers are circumspect. They they can smell something that that looks a bit too glossy or, you know, a bit too good to be true, a mile off. And I think that the one of the differences between developer relations and anywhere else in the company, I won't call out marketing in particular, but one of the differences between developer relations and anywhere else in the company is that you're more likely to get the honest like, the honest viewpoint of, you know, this is what it is. These are actually why you might not use it. This is actually what it's not that good at, but this is what it's really good at.

Speaker 4: You know, as a developer, I'm talking to you about my own experience with this tool. And, you know, we're gonna talk as developers together about the issues you might face with it and how this might help you. The other thing I wanted to raise with the whole being marketed to thing is that if there's friction in any of your processes to getting folks to try your products even to hear the messages you wanna give them, then everybody hates that, think, not just developers. So, you know, if I just wanna watch a webinar and I've gotta give you my inside leg measurement and my dad's occupation and my work email, I can't give you my Gmail, then I'm just gonna not gonna watch your webinar even though it might be really educational to me. It might have been produced by the technical team, but there's this layer of marketing, like clear marketing in between.

Speaker 4: Or, you know, if I wanna sign up for your free trial, how much friction is there in that process too? And I think that nobody likes that, not just developers.

Speaker 2: Well, this is what I this is what I've been saying for a while now is I don't think it's that developers dislike marketing. I think it's that everybody dislikes bad marketing. And people rarely notice good marketing. It's almost like being fish in water and not noticing that there's water surrounding you because it's just there.

Speaker 4: Yeah. That's a good analogy for deep dives.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It keeps coming back. Yeah. So we're coming, you know, not not entirely towards the end, but we're we're kind of powering through our time, and it's going quickly. One thing I was quite interested in discussing was marketing, in general, is a much older discipline than developer relations.

Speaker 2: And I think there are clearer career paths within marketing. So some people go into field marketing, some people go into the data side and, you know, content and whatever. What I'd like to hear, I guess, is is what do you think about what we as developer relations can learn from how marketing organizes itself?

Speaker 5: You mean, like, having a career ladder? Or

Speaker 2: Or even departmentally because, you know, dev dev real teams, we've gone from the universal developer advocate who had to do everything, and now larger teams are splitting into developer education, experience, and developer advocacy, and so on. So how's both structurally within Teams and career wise? I

Speaker 5: think it makes sense when you have, like, a developer relations team where you have, let's say, I don't know, multiple developer advocates to see where every single one of them shines. Maybe someone is incredible at giving talks. Someone else just builds fantastic demos. Someone else can is a fantastic writer. And you just allow everyone, like, every single one of them to do what they do best.

Speaker 5: Maybe someone is really good at video. Maybe someone just enjoys livestream, and they can keep the audience just engaged. And so, yeah, I I guess that's kind of, like, how like, this kind of, like, structure gives the highest ROI because, you know, you just end up with a team of specialists, and all of them, they just produce really high quality stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1: So it's based on your

Speaker 2: oh, sorry, Christie. Go ahead.

Speaker 3: I was just gonna say that, Mahmoud, that was stated so beautifully. Give people the thing that is that they're really great at doing and let them do that. I think structurally or hierarchically, I I don't have a lot of opinions on that because I think every developer relations function needs to operate the best for its community. I think globally can be very challenging. For example, we have a developer relations function in Japan, and we I know who they are, but I never talk to them.

Speaker 3: Right? Okay. Because what they do is so different than what we do. However, I would love to talk to them because there might be some really good learnings there, some really good opportunities to to bolster them or to bolster us. So I I don't like the separate but equal, definitely, but I but I think that you should you should be in the places where your people are and whatever guys that means.

Speaker 3: Now marketing will separate itself out. Right? There's field marketing. There's, you know, b to c. There's b to v.

Speaker 3: There is demand generation. There's the data side. There's operations. There's all different kinds of things. I think the bigger your marketing department is, probably the smarter that is because all things can roll up and all things can roll down.

Speaker 3: And there's one succinct view. Everybody's working towards the same activity, but that activity work gets more specialized to create a holistic approach. And I think possibly that might be true for developer relations as well. But, again, do what's right for your audience and your people.

Speaker 4: Yeah. For me, really, it needs to start with you need to have a really strong strategy in place. And then you can decide how you wanna structure your department. So we've already kind of seen that, you know, you've got folks that are more on the education side, and then you've got others that are more in the advocacy space. You might decide that you wanna have sort of a mini team of educators, and then you wanna have a mini team of advocates.

Speaker 4: And what you also need to think about is your leadership in your team. So just as we've kind of touched on this, developer relations is one set of skills. So it's you could argue mostly it's about development skills. And then you have to have a very strong communication expertise as well. So it's mostly about development with a very strong communication salon, and you're not a trained marketer.

Speaker 4: Whereas if you work in the marketing department, you're probably gonna be a trained marketer whether it was through academia or on the job. And you know something about the tool, but you don't know anything deeply about it. And you you you're probably not as strong a code as the folks in the dev rel team. So that's a totally different skill set. And within your dev rel team, it's really important to have that strategy, but also to give you the direction.

Speaker 4: Because I think a lot of teams are directionless. They think, well, I'm gonna make this piece of content now because somebody asked for it. Where does that fit into any kind of wider piece that you're trying to do in your team and what you're trying to achieve? You also need a nice management layer in there that can really help to nurture the staff. And again, that's a really different skill set.

Speaker 4: So you could have a management layer in your DevRel team that is not necessarily a strong developer. They're not necessarily great at content, but they really deeply understand the strategy, how you fit in with other units, going off and talking to those people in other parts of the organization to make your people's lives easier as well. So, yeah, your DefRel team is gonna consist of people with all different types of skills, but I would really advocate for dividing it up to the types of things you wanna achieve. So do you wanna educate people? Put some people in that team.

Speaker 4: Do you wanna advocate for the product and advocate for the developer? Put some people in that team. Do you wanna have a community team? Make a community team. You might have ops in there as well.

Speaker 4: So you might not have folks that aren't necessarily strategic, but in community that Christy will know this, there is so much operational stuff that you have to do. And it could be really useful to have some folks dedicated to that as well.

Speaker 2: Okay. Superb. Great. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Brilliantly put. Thank you.

Speaker 2: We've got two or three minutes

Speaker 4: left. So

Speaker 2: I'd like to hear from each of you just briefly kind of what are your what would your advice be to someone who's running a DevRel team and they feel that developer marketing is being neglected in their organization?

Speaker 4: That is a huge question, Matthew. But have only a few minutes left at the end. I think think

Speaker 5: about The

Speaker 1: big one for the end.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Exactly. Always. Think about why you think developer marketing's being neglected. What is the feedback or what is the intel or or, you know, what is informing that view of yours?

Speaker 4: How would you like it to look? And how what does it mean for you to get there? Because, you know, a lot of people, if you said to them, what would you really love? They would want everything. But, actually, you know, look at the objectives of the organization.

Speaker 4: What is the organization trying to achieve? Yes. Okay. They want more sales. I mean, you can always take that as a given, but what else are they trying to achieve?

Speaker 4: And then align your developer relations strategy to that. And I think that will help you gain some clarity around what it is you actually need, And then you could it will help you to put forth a more convincing argument for getting those resources and getting those tools to to get what you need.

Speaker 2: Okay. Great. Thanks. Well, I think you kind of took us up to to time there, Sue, so thank you for that. Well, look, Mahmoud, Sous, Christie, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2: Where can people find out more about what you're each working on? Makamud, what what about starting with you? I can reach do you wanna share how can people find you on the Internet?

Speaker 5: Yeah. Sorry. Hi. So, yeah, I'm mostly active on Twitter. We can share a link on Discord.

Speaker 5: That's where I usually start most discussions, and I tweet about kind of, like, the work that I do. Plus anyone, feel free to reach me. I'm happy to start, conversations with people. Yeah. That's where I mostly hang up.

Speaker 2: Suze. Suze.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 4: You can find me at suze.dev. That's my personal website. You can contact me through there. If you prefer Twitter, I'm at suze charblo there. And almost everywhere really other than that on the Redis Discord discord.gg/redis and obviously on developer relations Discord as

Speaker 2: well. Christie?

Speaker 3: I'm c fedur UK on Twitter, and anybody can reach me there anytime. I could not sign up for Discord for the wonderful DevRelCon Discord because Discord thought that I was a spammer and disabled me before they even activated me. So if anybody is watching this from Discord, if you could please help look. I'm a nice person. I'm not spamming anybody.

Speaker 3: I just wanted to sign up for Discord. So if anybody wants to help me with that, I'd appreciate it.

Speaker 2: Okay. Cool.

Speaker 1: Well, thank you all.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you so much. These discussions always go too quickly. I feel like we only ever scratched the surface. So thank you thank you for for scratching that surface with us.

Speaker 2: Alright. Well, we'll move on to the next thing. So goodbye, Mahmoud, Suze, and Christie. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Deep Dives. Yar.