Reflections on 2 Years Running Developer Relations

Summary

My last day at Dagster has wrapped up, and after two years of building and running developer marketing, I thought I’d take the time to answer some questions I often get about DevRel and developer marketing. The timing feels right to share what I’ve learned. It seems like DevRel has had a resurgence lately. I’ve seen more discussions on it on X, and many more job postings and recruiter calls trying to fill these roles. I sense that it’s related to the challenges of breaking through the noise within the latest AI/LLM craze that has been building over the past few years. Google Search/SEO is dead; the cost of producing mediocre automated content is essentially zero, and so the question on many people’s minds is How do we reach developers? The answer often defaults to “hire DevRel,” and often, I think people have not thought about it more deeply than that. This post is a reflection on many things I’ve learned running DevRel, and hopefully can provide a framework and some guidance on answering questions I hear often.When I first joined Dagster, it was to run the DevRel team, and one of the first things I quickly realized was that no one really knew what the goal of the DevRel team was. Everyone had an opinion on what DevRel should do at Dagster, but no one agreed on that definition. The result was a lot of little tasks being completed, but without an overall story or narrative for it to fit under. This inevitably led to people wondering what the point of DevRel even was. This is not unique to Dagster at all, and it’s something I’ve heard many people tell me, both founders and developer advocates have suffered some version of this story.Over the next 2 years, I helped transform the team into one of the best teams I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single person at Dagster who wouldn’t sing the praises of the devrel team, whether they were producing engaging content that brought new leads in, working directly with the community, bri...