SAWO Vibe Check is the video series hosted by SAWO Labs, every Friday with some incredible industry professionals to share their insights and help the community with domains under the security ecosystem and the authentication world.
In the 2nd episode, we had Phil Leggetter who manages Developer Experience & Relations at tru.ID. Like many others before him, Phil was first introduced to Developer Evangelism when he came across Christian Heilmann’s Developer Evangelist Handbook. Post which, he has worked in different companies in different roles for the last 11 years.
DevRel Strategy
Along his journey, Phil created an approach framework for the companies looking at creating and executing developer relations strategy. The AAARRRP framework stands for Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Referral, Retention, Revenue and Product.
For every company, the needs from DevRel should align with their goals. The developer relations activities for the same company may differ for different locations as well. Even with a change in the time frame, the goals of a company can vary and so can the planned DevRel strategies.
Community within Authentication
Understanding the needs of the audience you are trying to reach is of paramount importance. Despite being a widely applicable real-life issue, the segment of people that care about authentication is narrow.
When talking about community within the auth space, there are two possibilities, one can be a broader community where people understand the true value of authentication, and on the other hand there is a much smaller community that we will ultimately create.
DevRel in Auth
According to Phil, there are three aspects to DevRel, namely developer experience, developer education and success. In any team, it is extremely important to get the API standards, documentation, code samples and the product right.
In the Auth space, enterprises are more inclined towards technology. A sales team is required so that the developer receives product feedback, to create a bug-free product.
Product feedback, product development and product management will fall under the umbrella of developer experience. Also, it is important to educate your developers and create awareness of the functionalities of the product.
At SAWO Labs, we hold Product Round-tables inviting developers who have worked with our product to receive feedback and utilize them to improve the product. One of our go-to catchphrases for the community is “Your feedback is gold for us”.
Importance of Communities
Let’s take an example of a developer-centric company. A founder who is a developer, understands the value of developers and that of a DevRel team. They would be able to build good products without a developer relations team too.
In companies where founders are not developers, a DevRel team is required to empathize with the developers and build the best possible product.
The size of a DevRel team depends on the size of the company and their needs. If its an API first company, hiring a generic developer advocate to handle different tasks could be beneficial. As the company grows, they would be able to specialize in their areas of interest.
A general team structure would consist of:
- Developer Advocates for specialized programming languages
- Community Manager to represent those communities and have collaborative conversations
- Developer Experience Team to build the SDKs, to maintain API standards and for documentation.
- Developer Education Team focused on blog content, youtube channel, etc.
Ideally a community team, supports all the other teams’ engagement to accelerate growth, hire generalists to build and run the company in different locations and encourage a culture of collaboration and innovation.
Future of Communities
When articulating about business, it is essential to identify what communities really mean. The best way to understand it is with the Orbit Model.
Developer Relations is about supporting and enabling communities. Community is a how-to for DevRel. If you want to reach developers, community is how you can reach them. For the future of any company that wants to interact with developers as users, building a community is just as fundamental as building a product.
Getting Started with DevRel
Every company needs different things from Developer Relations. Strategies can be built aligning to the goals of the company.
According to Phil, an applicant should focus on:
- A well written CV is imperative
- GitHub/GitLab link
- Links to your blog posts or talks
- Involvement with the community
- How you understand code and developers
If you are interested in getting into Developer Relations, you should care about and show a passion to support and enable communities.
If you want to check out the entire episode, head over to the recording below.
If you liked the episode, make sure to attend upcoming episodes, we host it every Friday at 7 PM IST on our YouTube Channel.
Support & queries
You can join our Discord Server Community and interact with other developers and can ask for any support you require.
In case of any other query, feel free to reach out to us at community.sawolabs@gmail.com
