Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide

NEW 3rd Edition - September 2020
This is the third edition of the book that has earned 14 5-star reviews. It’s now bigger,richer and better.
Your walk-through guide to Developer Marketing and Relations now has 9 new chapters since the first edition + 1 more reviewed chapter.
Build your DevRel dream team and project. Learn from success and failure stories.

Welcome to the third edition of "Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide". The history starts in October 2017, during the Future Developer Summit. There, Andreas Constantinou and Nicolas Sauvage fully recognized the fragmented nature of developer relations or DevRel – from the types of companies, the products they represented, and the knowledge of the practitioners. It was there we witnessed that the best practices were often locked behind the doors of the companies that mastered them. We knew we wanted develop an essential guide to share this knowledge with a broader audience of developer relations, evangelists & advocates, developer marketing practitioners and beyond.

As we have watched the practice of DevRel grow and evolve over the last three years, there is a continued need for education of what DevRel is, along with the strategy and tactics needed for a successful program. The good news is, many of the leading practitioners from the best companies agreed to share their knowledge, stories, learnings, and best practices in this guide! We think you’ll find the information insightful, whether you are a seasoned professional in developer relations or you are just getting started.

A question we often get asked is: “Can you help us understand how Mozilla, Google, or Microsoft practice developer marketing?” (replace names with your favorite tech brands). That's exactly what this book aims to accomplish.

This guide is arranged in an order that takes you from strategic issues to more tactical issues. You can read from start to finish, or jump into the chapter that focuses on what you need to know right now. At a strategic level, you may want to read “Using Developer Personas to Stay Customer-Obsessed” from Cliff Simpkins of Microsoft, or if you are building out a program you might try “Structuring Developer Relations”, by Dirk Primbs of Google. If you are just starting out, be sure to read, “Starting from Scratch: How to Build a Developer Marketing Program”, by Luke Kilpatrick of Nutanix. If you need to get many stakeholders together in a large organization, the “The Developer Relations Council: Leading and Aligning Developer Marketing within Large Companies” by Arabella David of Salesforce - a new chapter for the third edition- is a must. Then, learn how to understand numbers and KPIs in our new chapter “Measuring the success of a developer communications strategy” by our very own Rich Muir of SlashData.

As mentioned, developer programs exist in many types, as different companies are marketing different types of products to developers. Ana Schafer and Christine Jorgensen of Qualcomm describe their experiences with communities around hardware in “Hardware Is the New Software - Building A Developer Community Around A Chip Instead Of An SDK”. APIs are well known as a key product in DevRel so we are pleased to bring you a new chapter by Mehdi Medjaoui, founder of APIdays conferences “Developer Relations and APIs”.

We can’t list all of the great chapters here, but we would be remiss if we didn’t point out the chapters on community, the heart and soul of any leading developer relations program. Be sure to read “The Power Of Community” by Jacob Lehrbaum of Salesforce, and the new chapter “Building an Inclusive Developer Community” by Leandro Margulis, based on his days at TomTom.

Andreas Constantinou, Founder & CEO, SlashData
Nicolas Sauvage, President & Managing Director, TDK Ventures
Caroline Lewko & Dana Fujikawa, Editors of the third edition, WIP

SlashData is the analyst of the developer ecosystem. We help top-100 tech companies understand developer audiences and measure the RoI of their developer strategies. 
With more than 10 years of data-backed developer research, we know where developers come from and where they are going. We have consistent data on why they get involved in development, what they're learning, in which industries and on what they are working, which technologies they use and how happy they are with them, and what they expect from vendors and developer communities. We track how the population grows, locally and globally, and how its profile changes over time. 
More than 30K developers from more than 150 countries share their experiences with us each year through our Developer Economics surveys. Our sample is diverse, representative and exhaustive of the communities out there. We translate our surveys in 9+ languages each time, and reach out to developer communities of all shapes and sizes, with our network of 70+ leading partners globally. 80% of responses coming from new participants each time. Yet, our findings on technology adoption and trends are consistent, survey after survey. For further details on our methodology, please visit slashdata.co/methodology.
Our aim is to empower the DevRel community by providing the data they need to make the right decisions and step up their DevRel game, for best developer experience. Besides "Developer Marketing and Relations: The essential guide", we produce the "Under the Hood of Developer Marketing" podcast where experts in the field share not just their successes, but also their biggest challenges. The Future Developer Summit is our bi-annual event for developer marketing and relations leaders. Moreover, we run the Developer Program Leaders' survey twice per year and publish the results. You can visit devrelx.com and discover all our DevRel initiatives, as well as dig into our rich collection of developer research data.