Why Every Tech Company Needs a Developer Advocate (And How to Be One)
Hello there! Have you ever heard of the term “Developer Advocate”? If you’re not familiar with it, don’t worry! I’m here to explain it to you.😁
🚀So, what is a Developer Advocate exactly?
A Developer Advocate, in a nutshell, acts as the link between the company and its developer community. They serve as the connection between the technical team and the developer community, offering input to both sides in order to assist developers in becoming successful with a certain platform or technology.
However, Developer Advocates are not your typical marketing people. They have a solid technological background and are engineers at heart. They create and ship apps, and their primary mission is to assist their developer community in doing better work more quickly and effectively.
🚀Responsibilities of a Developer Advocate
So, what are the main responsibilities of a Developer Advocate? Essentially, they help both the developer community and the company by bridging the gap between an organization’s internal engineering teams and their larger community of developers.
Let’s understand it using the English Alphabets. Or what I call it: The ABCDEF Rule
A - Advocate for company
Serving as two-way interlink between the community and company.
B - Build relationships with developers in community
Connecting with the community and understanding their problems.
C - Create content
Writing technical documentation for the product, articles to explain the use case, creating tutorials or other videos which facilitates the learning of the community.
D - Discuss the Product
Onboarding, calls, meetups, conferences, events are essential part of developer advocates daily life.
E - Empower company’s social media
Create engaging social platforms of company where community members can feel free to interact and ask their doubts.
F - Feedback
Collect the feedback from the community and give to the engineering and management team.
🚀How to land your first DevRel Role
- Get technical expertise of technology/ product/ company you want to advocate
- Get community work experience
- Build Per sonal Brand
- Engage in public speaking at technical events
- Learn People Skills
- Learn and build in public and create content around it in the form of videos or blogs
🚀How to be a GOOD Developer Advocate
To excel in this role, one should
- Understand the needs of community as well as developers
- Be good at public speaking.
- Think outside the box.
- Put yourself in end users’ position.
- Stay hands-on with what you are advocating.
- Enjoy working with people.
So, there you have it a quick and easy-to-understand explanation of what a Developer Advocate does, how to land your first DevRel role and excel in it. I hope this post was helpful and informative for you!
Feel free to hit me on Twitter! Also, do check out my repositories on GitHub and don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you would like to work on any of my existing projects or think I would be a good fit in your project.😁
That’s all for today. See you in the next one. Till then keep hustling together just like THE MINIONS do😁
