
Ask HN: What Are the KPIs or Metrics for Success in 'Developer Relations'? - bayareamaverick
What are some of the important metrics to measure success in a &quot;Developer Relations&quot; or Developer Advocate role?
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mary_grace
Like panda888888 said, DevRel in an ideal world is less about metrics and more
about listening and building relationships with your community, but as we all
know, metrics are still necessary to prove business value and to keep the team
alive within a company.

I wrote a whole book about how to determine and show the business value of
DevRel at your particular company ([http://persea-
consulting.com/book](http://persea-consulting.com/book)) but there are two
main points I'll highlight here:

1) When reporting success to stakeholders at your company, focus less on the
work output (how many conferences did you speak at, blogposts did you write,
etc.) and more on the goals that those tasks pushed forward. What's the
purpose of the blogposts? Are you trying to improve your audience's onboarding
experience by writing tutorials or sample applications to help them understand
various uses of your product? Are you speaking at conferences for brand
awareness purposes or to popularize the key principles that your product is
built upon? Focus on those topics instead of "I did `x`." For instance, focus
on how many fewer support tickets were decreased as a result of your tutorial
or improved documentation.

2) Make sure that your goals are aligned with the company goals. Your team
mission should point back to the overarching company goals in a way that it's
clear the work that you're doing will further the goals of the company. (Note:
If you don't have a team mission, you should! I wrote an article about that
here: [https://cmxhub.com/follow-the-north-star-creating-a-
communit...](https://cmxhub.com/follow-the-north-star-creating-a-community-
team-mission-statement/)) Your value comes from building relationships with a
technical audience over a longer period of time, which means you'll need to
show how the work that you're doing is beneficial to the company in the
present day as well as in the future, but through your mission and goals being
aligned with the rest of the company, the stakeholders should be able to see
that while perhaps non-traditional, the work that you're doing is beneficial.

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johnnycarcin
\- Social media posts/followers \- How many events you presented at

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panda888888
If your company does developer relations right, it's less about metrics and
more about listening.

