Cara membuat tim hubungan pengembang bekerja untuk perusahaan Anda

In a quarter-to-quarter world, sometimes the best investment is in building relationships for the long run. That’s the approach developer relations teams use: Supporting internal developers and community members to ensure a good experience. These community connections can result in crowd-sourced solutions to problems, loyal users and even new product features.

Raman Sharma, vice president of product marketing at cloud specialist DigitalOcean, said that developer relations covers everything from evangelizing a company’s products to developers through content and code to working with users to gather feedback to managing open source aspects of a company’s products.

“For developer-first and product-led companies, developer relations programs help complement the self-serve growth engine through content and brand building,” he said. “For more traditional sales-led companies, these programs help build bottom-up awareness and adoption so that not just the conventional ‘decision-makers’ but also the actual users and practitioners of the technology can weigh in on technology decisions.”

Membangun hubungan sebagai strategi bisnis

Mary Thengvall, kepala hubungan pengembang di Camunda, mengatakan pekerjaannya mencakup pengelolaan komunitas, advokasi pengembang, dan pengalaman pengembang. 

“We advocate for problems the community is running into and make sure developers have a good experience with our software and our company, which covers ease of use and time to value,” she said.

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Thengvall’s team also works on building internal relationships at Camunda, an open source workflow and decision automation platform. She connects the community to product managers, customer support teams, marketing, sales and internal developers. 

Her overriding mission is to connect the work her team does to the higher goals of the company. It’s harder to quantify the ROI of building relationships in the developer community than to measure other metrics but the benefits are there, Thengvall said.

“Our work reduces churn, creates colleagues and builds a community people don’t want to leave,” she said. 

Jika anggota komunitas merasakan hubungan yang cukup kuat dengan perusahaan, mereka dapat menyumbangkan fitur baru atau mengatasi bug, katanya.

Thengvall said her team’s strong relations with the developer community makes it easier for Camunda to build a better product.

“For a lot of community members, and people using these products, they trust the developer relations team to be the most authentic and most upfront whether or not that means you’ll be giving us money at the end of the day,” she said.

Timnya juga mendukung anggota komunitas yang ingin menyumbangkan postingan blog atau mengembangkan abstrak untuk diserahkan ke konferensi. 

Thengvall got her start in community building at O’Reilly Media, where she talked with readers about other resources the company could provide. 

“That changed into asking: How do we make sure we’re doing what’s right by people attending our conferences or using our software,” she said. 

Thengvall juga punya menulis buku tentang DevRel, menyelenggarakan podcast tentang topik tersebut dan menerbitkan buletin. 

Apakah Anda memerlukan tim DevRel?

Devin Rader, direktur hubungan pengembang dunia di Twilio, mengatakan tidak semua bisnis perangkat lunak memerlukan grup DevRel. Perusahaan harus mempertimbangkan produk dan pelanggannya sebelum memutuskan bagaimana tim hubungan pengembang dapat membantu. 

“DevRel can’t really be boiled down into a monolithic function or specific role,” he said. “Where the DevRel team sits, in terms of department or org, tells you how its goals should align to the business and what will be seen and measured as a success.”

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Produk yang paling cocok untuk memiliki peran hubungan pengembang adalah produk yang pengguna akhir langsung dari produk tersebut adalah pengembang dan ada cara bagi pengembang individu untuk mendaftar dan menggunakan produk tersebut, Sachin Gupta, CEO HackerEarth, mengatakan .

“If there is no way for a developer to sign up and directly use the product, then there is not a lot that the developer relations team can drive,” he said.

Manfaat memiliki tim DevRel

Gupta mengatakan tim DevRel dapat memiliki banyak tujuan, antara lain:

• Mendorong pendaftaran atau uji coba
• Mengemudi penggunaan pasca pendaftaran
• Mengumpulkan umpan balik produk dari pengembang
• Menciptakan komunitas tempat pengembang mendiskusikan masalah produk dan saling membantu dengan pertanyaan tentang produk
• Membangun kesadaran merek di komunitas pengembang

Thengvall mengatakan tugas-tugas individu tersebut bekerja sama untuk mendorong hal ini tiga manfaat utama ini:

1. Kesadaran: Sponsor komunitas, jam kerja, acara, dan pertunjukan ceramah
2. Pemberdayaan: Tutorial, contoh aplikasi, dan pendidikan pengembang
3. Keterlibatan: Forum, konten kontribusi komunitas, dan panduan kontributor

She sees each element working in a virtuous cycle and supporting developer advocacy and a company’s profile in the community. 

Rader mengatakan tim DevRel juga dapat mendukung siklus penjualan. 

“Research shows that developers have substantial influence on IT purchasing decisions in their organizations, so there is great value in engaging with this audience,” he said.

DevRel teams also could help with the hiring process. Thengvall also coined the term “Prospek yang memenuhi syarat DevRel,”  community members her team connects with colleagues on internal marketing, recruiting or sales teams.

“The best hires come from community members because they are already aware of the product and the staff,” she said.

Cara membuat tim DevRel bekerja untuk perusahaan Anda

The job market for developer advocates has exploded in the past year and a half, Thengvell said. Her newsletter includes job postings and she has seen the numbers go from 40 – 50 new postings per month to more than 200.

Dia menyarankan agar perusahaan yang merekrut peran ini untuk pertama kalinya harus berterus terang tentang apa yang mereka butuhkan. 

“If you don’t know what you’re hiring for, be upfront and tell the candidates that you need someone to come in and build the strategy, rather than trying to sketch out one in advance,” she said.

Kesalahan besar lainnya yang dia lihat adalah mengharapkan tim DevRel berdampak pada penjualan.

“The end result of building relationships could of course be sales but if there’s any expectation of a dotted line to more sales, you’ll eliminate any authenticity,” she said.

Thengvall mengatakan memiliki tim DevRel mengharuskan perusahaan untuk mempertimbangkan dan menerapkan masukan dari komunitas. 

“If we don’t have any space on the road map for those ideas, I don’t want to ask community members for their feedback,” she said. 

Gupta mengatakan tim hubungan pengembang dapat fokus pada pengembang sebagai audiens informasi perusahaan. 

“Both the marketing channels and the marketing message are different for the developer community compared to any other traditional audience,” he said.

Gupta said it’s also important to have someone in this job who understands a developer mindset, such as a software developer. 

“This not only ensures that they understand the audience but they are also better able to connect with the community, as developers are very wary of being marketed to directly,” he said. 

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