You probably shouldn't hire a Developer Advocate yet

TL;DR : Many companies searching for Developer Advocates probably shouldn't be hiring yet. More often than not, what they need first is some internal mindset change. And even then, a Developer Experience will go a long way to achieve the first stages of a healthy community.

Many companies searching for Developer Advocates probably shouldn't be hiring yet. More often than not, what they need first is some internal mindset change. And even then, a Developer Experience will go a long way to achieve the first stages of a healthy community.

Note : I don't intend to describe what a Developer Advocate does in this post. Others have done it better than I could. This article also both discusses internal as well as external Developer Advocacy challenges.

I've been officially in the world of Developer Relations for just about 4 years now and I've had multiple occasions where people would come up to me and asking me for advice on how to find their first Developer Advocate.
And even if there's many ways I could help them with that, my answer after chatting for some time is "well you probably shouldn't". This blog is a list of a few of the reasons that keep coming back and my thoughts on it

"Why do you folks want to hire a Developer Advocate?"

The company struggles with talent retention

They struggle to keep their best profiles, who go on to find better pastures. They want to hire a developer advocate to improve this.

This one is always super interesting to me. When digging up more, it turns out that the reasons are typically pretty clear :

• It's a shame, we're a great company but we're losing out best people because the competition pays more.
• Our best elements are leaving because they reach a ceiling and cannot be promoted any more unless they move to management
• Our developers wants to write / speak at conferences / organise events but we don't have budget for them / our policies don't allow it.
• Our developers build what they're told, it's the product team who decides what to build.

A lot of the answers above cannot directly be solved by a Developer Advocate, and maybe even make them worse. A lot of the keys needed to solve the issues above lie in the HR realm.
Improve your compensation packages, open up more growth opportunities for your tech profiles, rework your product / tech work relationship, ...
Yes, those may be longer projects and / or more expensive but believe me they're better than putting lipstick on a pig. Your engineers are smart and you'll do more harm than good.

The company struggles with internal upskilling

"Our developers aren't upskilling and staying up to date with market trends and we need someone to bring that knowledge inside and motivate people to learn".

I find that one super interesting. As a developer in a company, I'd be tremendously pissed if someone was paid to go to conferences in my stead and report to me on what I should learn.
Again, I find that sort of discussion fascinating :

• Do you not have a good internal candidate for this already? Why not?
• Are your developers not upskilling, or are you simply not aware of it?
• Humans are typically curious by nature. What makes it that they're not learning ? Do you have budget / opportunities in place? What does the workload look like?
• And picking from the amazing "Accelerate" book : Do you have a culture of safety and experimentation in place? Do you lead by example? When was the last time you went on a conference or shared knowledge yourself?

The company struggles with hiring "A" players

They want to speed up hiring and capture better profiles.

Typically my first question is "what makes your current profiles not good enough"? And we're typically back to the upskilling / retention discussion. What is an A player anyway?

One of the things that I consistently discover and find super interesting is that there always seems to be a disconnect between the Marketing team who will be responsible for Tech Branding and the actual techies on the floor. And the problem only grows the larger the company is.
I've literally been in discussions where people would say "we need to hire influencers in the space" only to answer "really? How about this person in your company already who wrote 2 books on topic X. Or this person who spoke at 4 conferences the past year. Or this lady who happens to be a Java Champion? Or this other who literally organises part of the event you're sponsoring every year on their own time?"

Sure you can hire a Developer Advocate to find out those internal profiles and nurture them, but it seems cheaper to make sure whoever is responsible for Tech Branding also happens to be close to the communities they want to reach, or even better be part of it 😊.

Another point of discussion I raise usually is : why do you want A players? And what does that mean? Are your problems hard enough that you will be able to keep them sharp?
I don't know anyone who will say openly that they want to hire less than great developers. Still, not all companies are born equal. Refining what you mean exactly will go a long way in finding the right profiles, and will also help line up expectations for new hires. There's nothing more damaging to your technical brand than advertising something and getting people who convert to realise they've been fed incorrect information. Especially "A players".

(Consultancy) Company wants to be more visible in the market

This one is actually more frequent than I was expecting. (Consultancy) company, who makes a living selling hours or projects (not products) wants someone to speak at conferences / podcasts / write for them in order to increase their brand visibility (aka thought leadership).

That can make a lot of sense, and there's great examples of this on the market. That being said, it depends on the strategy being used. You want to be more visible, great! But visible to who? Who is the decision maker at your future customer? Which kind of events do those people participate in, where do they get their influences from, and from what kind of people ?
A lot of the times, the answer is probably close to C-level or directors. And I would then argue that your own C-level / directors probably would be the best leaders to create influence outside the company in that setting. They are the ones shaping the vision of the company, and spreading it out. At least that's where it should start from.

(Small) company has a (technical) product and wants to market it to techies

Now, we're getting closer from the realm of what your typical Developer Advocate excels at. The request makes sense, but let's dive into the topic a little deeper.

The question "What kind of activities do you want your Developer Advocate to do?" are usually answered with :

• Go to conferences / man conference booths and talk about our products
• Make videos and blogs about the product / new features
• Respond to questions on Stack Overflow / Social Media
• ...

With the typical goal of largely increasing the number of new accounts created / monthly entering developers.

Now, that's where I love to discuss more about the product in itself. All the activities described make a lot of sense, but each activity also targets a specific part of the product funnel. And before promoting the heck out of a project, you want to know if people will love the project.

Because your real success metric actually probably is the number of monthly active developers (ideally paying). If most of them are leaking out right after entering, you're going to struggle being successful.

Many developers simply don't go to conferences, and aren't going to read about you until they have a specific issue to fix. Conferences are also incidentally the most expensive activity one can think of, in straight up money but also time!

At this point we're entering the wonderful and exciting world of ✨Developer Experience✨.

• Do you offer free accounts?
• Are you using the expected standards in the industry in terms of APIs, WebHooks, ....
• Do you have sample data for folks to get onboard quickly?
• How accessible is your roadmap?
• Are you already active in the community of the domain you're in ? Do you conform to their expectations? (Example : If you're into APM, do you support OpenTelemetry? If you're doing PostgreSQL, are you an active contributer?)

The outcome of that discussion gives you a pretty clear idea of how far they are in the process, and how much can achieve joining them.

In conclusion

I find all those discussions fascinating. They're all very important problems and they're typically things that executives spend a lot of brain cycles on. What I find most interesting is that very often those people already know what their real issue is. But it seems harder or more expensive to fix the root cause so they want to hire a Developer Advocate instead to tackle the issue.

It's definitely possible to hire a consultant to help you shape your strategy, setup an action plan or more. I find it interesting that "hire a developer advocate" became some kind of catch all in a way. A superpower that will help solve underlying issues. This could absolutely work, but if the hire has the direct mandate to solve those issues and they typically cross many departments.

One more thing that I remark is that "Developer Advocate" often seems conflated with "Developer Relations" and many of the other fields adjacent to it. Developer Education, Developer Experience, Technical Product Management, ... these are all very valid needs, but they're not quite the same as "Developer Advocacy".

Not an issue per se, it's all part of the journey to dive into this. Hiring someone without giving them the keys for being successful, in a field that is generally known for being hard to measure without going through the journey is a waste though (but that's a topic for a whole other post)!

Wanna chat, do you agree, disagree or think you have another challenge? Just hit me up 😊!

Thanks Floor for the insanely fast review