SAWO Vibe Check Ep-5 | Starting & Scaling DevRel Teams | Vera Tiago

SAWO Vibe Check is the video series hosted by SAWO Labs, every Friday with some incredible industry leaders to share their insights on tech, business, and communities.

In the 5th episode, we had Vera Tiago, Team Lead, Developer Advocacy at OutSystems.

Growing the DevRel Team at OutSystems

Under the mentorship of her visionnaire manager, Vera initially did the heavy lifting of being a developer evangelist as a one-woman army. With an enormous amount of tasks on their hands, they felt the need to scale up and grow their team.

They got behind the idea of a developer community and strategized by penning down a compelling story for their target audience.

Post this, they created visuals to attract and engage with new developers. They rebuilt their strategy focussing on the 3 Es:

• Excite: Increasing buzz to attract new developers through a community-led approach
• Educate: Investing in content and educating developers on how to use the products
• Experience: Ideation regarding the products based on feedback provided by the community.

To achieve their ultimate goals of increasing revenues and delivering high customer satisfaction, they adhered to their strategy and directed all their attention to reach their target KPIs. The community lent a huge helping hand in accomplishing their goals!

Following that, the team hypothesized and committed to a short term and long-term plan, to be adequately prepared. The Super Users Program acted as a huge differentiator for Outsystems.

Two important insights to be mindful of before scaling a team are, to create a compelling narrative for you to get a buy-in and to communicate your results to the stakeholders and the community.

Takeaways for a team leader looking to build a community

• It is extremely important to focus on customer success
• Keep the communication channels open between different departments. Collaboration can help resolve a lot of problems
• Focus on your products and reflect on the feedback received from the community
• Make sure the end users are creating meaningful connections.

DevRel Team at Outsystems

Depending on the company’s community, developer relations teams have different goals and team structures. The DevRel team at OutSystems consists of developer advocates and community managers.

The community managers create various programs and put together ways to connect with members of the community and support them. They basically run the user group program, the external advocacy programs like the MVP program and the Champions program. They are also responsible for the education program.

The developer advocates are the technical experts who speak at conferences, create content like educational blog articles or reusable components for people to use. Few advocates also focus on creating video content. There are some developer advocates who are closer to the product, making sure the developers have a voice while building and upgrading the platform.

Suggestions for newbies in DevRel

• Find DevRel communities and engage with them
• It is a bonus if you are a developer or empathize with those in the Tech space
• Find tech people you feel empathy towards, reach out to them and schedule calls to understand their perspective
• Recognize opportunities. There is an increase of jobs and opportunities owing to the pandemic.

We hope you had a great time reading. 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.

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