What is Developer Relations (DevRel)?
A developer at a conference asks a tough technical question about your API’s behavior under edge cases. Someone from your team pulls up a code editor, reproduces the issue live on stage, walks through the solution, and discusses the architectural tradeoffs involved. That’s Developer Relations in action, but it’s just one visible moment in a much broader practice.
Developer Relations, commonly called DevRel, is the practice of building relationships between a company and its developer community through technical expertise, education, and authentic engagement. In short, it’s about helping developers succeed with your product or platform, not by selling to them, but by genuinely supporting their work and bringing their needs back into your company’s product decisions.
For companies building developer-facing products, APIs, or platforms, especially in complex industries, DevRel can be the difference between a product that developers tolerate and one they actively advocate for. But it’s frequently misunderstood, often confused with developer marketing, and sometimes implemented in ways that undermine its effectiveness.
The core function of Developer Relations
Developer Relations sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and marketing, but it’s not quite any of those things. The primary goal of DevRel is to help developers succeed with your product or platform. The secondary goal is to bring developer feedback, needs, and insights back into your company to improve the product and developer experience.
This is fundamentally different from marketing, which focuses on acquisition, lead generation, and brand awareness. It’s also different from technical support, which is reactive and focused on solving specific problems. DevRel is proactive relationship-building with a technical foundation. Developer advocates aren’t there to close deals or generate leads. They’re there to make developers successful, with the understanding that successful developers become advocates themselves.
The work is technical, not promotional. A developer advocate needs to understand your product deeply enough to build with it, debug issues with it, and discuss its architecture and tradeoffs honestly. They need credibility with developers, which comes from demonstrating genuine technical competence and a willingness to acknowledge limitations alongside capabilities. And in complex industries, this technical depth becomes even more critical.
What Developer Relations actually does
The day-to-day work of Developer Relations spans several key activities, all oriented around helping developers succeed and improving the product based on their feedback.
Technical education and content
Developer advocates create educational content that helps developers understand and use your product effectively. This means writing tutorials that walk through real implementation scenarios. It means creating guides that address the actual complexity developers face, including edge cases, error handling, and integration patterns. It means producing sample applications that demonstrate best practices in realistic contexts.
This content is very, very different from marketing content. Where marketing content answers “why should you use this,” DevRel content answers “how do you actually build with this.” A DevRel tutorial doesn’t gloss over complexity or pretend everything is easy. It acknowledges challenges, shows how to work through them, and provides clear, tested code that developers can reference.
Video content, live streams, and workshops are common DevRel activities. These formats allow for more interactive learning and for demonstrating real-time problem-solving. A developer advocate might live-code a solution to a common integration challenge, showing not just the final result but the debugging and iteration process. This transparency builds trust because it shows honest technical work, not polished marketing demos.
Community engagement
Developer advocates spend significant time engaging with developer communities where technical discussions happen. This might be participating in relevant forums, responding to questions in GitHub discussions, or engaging on Stack Overflow with questions related to their domain expertise. It could involve speaking at technical conferences, participating in meetups, or hosting office hours where developers can ask questions and get real-time help.
The key distinction here is authenticity. Developer advocates are participating in these communities as technical practitioners, not as marketers infiltrating spaces to drop product links. When a developer asks a question about solving a particular problem, a good developer advocate’s response is genuinely helpful—whether or not it involves their company’s product. They’re building relationships and credibility over time, not optimizing for immediate conversions.
Developer advocacy
One of the most important and often overlooked aspects of DevRel is internal advocacy for developer needs. Developer advocates act as the voice of the developer community inside the company. They bring feedback from developers to product and engineering teams. They push for improvements to documentation, APIs, error messages, and developer experience based on what they’re hearing from actual users.
This means sometimes saying no to marketing initiatives that would damage developer trust. It means advocating for breaking changes to be handled more carefully, for documentation to be more comprehensive, or for features that developers actually need to be prioritized over features that sound good in marketing materials. A developer advocate’s loyalty is, in some sense, to the developers they serve, and they need the organizational support to represent those interests even when it creates tension.
In companies building tools for complex industries, this advocacy becomes crucial for product-market fit. Developers working in regulated environments have constraints that generic product thinking might miss. A developer advocate who understands both the technical product and the regulatory context can help the company avoid building features that won’t work in practice or missing requirements that are dealbreakers for the target audience.
Product feedback loop
Developer advocates serve as a critical feedback mechanism for product improvement. Because they’re deeply engaged with developers using the product, they see patterns in confusion, friction, and feature requests that might not be visible from support tickets or metrics alone. They can identify when documentation is unclear, when an API design is unintuitive, or when a common use case isn't well supported.
This feedback is valuable because it comes with context. A developer advocate doesn’t just report “developers are confused about authentication” but can explain exactly where the confusion happens, what developers are trying to accomplish, and what mental models they’re bringing from other tools. They can test new features from a developer’s perspective before they ship, catching issues that internal testing might miss.
They’re also often involved in beta programs, bringing in trusted community members to test new features and gather honest feedback. This helps companies avoid shipping things that look good internally but don’t work well for actual developer workflows. In complex industries where mistakes are costly, this early feedback loop is especially valuable.
DevRel vs. Developer marketing vs. Product marketing
Developer Relations is frequently confused with developer marketing or product marketing, but these are distinct functions with different goals and approaches. Understanding the differences is crucial for organizations trying to figure out what they need.
Developer marketing: Focuses on reach, acquisition, and lead generation. Developer marketers are thinking about campaigns, content distribution, SEO, paid advertising, and metrics like marketing qualified leads or website traffic. They’re working to get developers aware of the product and into the funnel. Their success is often measured by volume metrics: how many developers signed up, how many attended the webinar, how many downloaded the whitepaper.
Product marketing: Focuses on positioning, messaging, competitive differentiation, and go-to-market strategy. Product marketers are crafting the value propositions, creating the sales enablement materials, analyzing competitors, and planning product launches. They’re thinking about how to position the product in the market and what messages will resonate with different segments. Their work is essential for making sure the market understands what the product is and why it matters.
Developer Relations: Focuses on relationships, technical credibility, developer success, and community health. DevRel professionals are thinking about whether developers can actually be successful with the product, what barriers exist to their success, and how to build long-term trust with the developer community. Their success is measured by qualitative indicators like developer satisfaction, community engagement quality, and whether developers are advocating for the product to their peers.
These functions overlap and should work together. DevRel can inform developer marketing about which messages resonate with developers and which fall flat. Developer marketing can amplify the technical content that DevRel creates. Product marketing can benefit from DevRel’s deep understanding of developer needs and pain points. But they’re not interchangeable, and trying to make DevRel primarily serve marketing's lead generation goals undermines its effectiveness.
The critical difference is that DevRel can’t be effective if it’s treated as a lead generation function. Developers can immediately tell when someone is engaging with them primarily to generate leads versus genuinely helping them succeed. The moment DevRel becomes transactional, it loses the trust and credibility that makes it valuable in the first place.
Who makes a good developer advocate?
Not everyone with technical skills or marketing experience will be effective in DevRel. The role requires a specific combination of technical competence, communication ability, and genuine interest in helping others succeed.
Good developer advocates are technical practitioners who have built real things. They need to have experienced the challenges that developers face, not just read about them. This doesn’t mean they need to be senior architects or have decades of experience, but they need to have written code professionally, debugged production issues, integrated APIs, and dealt with the kinds of problems that their target developer audience faces. This lived experience is what gives them credibility and allows them to understand developer needs intuitively.
They’re also strong communicators who can explain complex technical topics clearly. This means being able to write tutorials that actually help people learn, give talks that maintain audience attention and deliver real value, and engage in technical discussions without being condescending or unclear. Technical competence without communication skills means you can’t effectively help developers. Communication skills without technical competence means developers won't trust you.
Developer advocates need to be community-minded people who genuinely enjoy helping others succeed. The work involves a lot of answering questions, often the same questions repeatedly. It involves celebrating other people’s successes with your product and supporting them through their struggles. If someone is primarily motivated by building their own projects or by competitive achievement, they're probably not going to be happy or effective in DevRel.
Patience and empathy are crucial. Developer advocates need to meet developers where they are, which means understanding that not everyone has the same level of experience or the same background knowledge. They need to be able to explain things at different levels of depth depending on the audience.
The ability to code live, debug in public, and admit mistakes is also important. Developers respect honesty and authenticity. A developer advocate who can work through a problem in real-time, including hitting dead ends and having to backtrack, demonstrates real technical skill in a way that polished demos never can. Being willing to be wrong and learn publicly builds trust.
For companies working in complex industries, domain expertise becomes increasingly important. A developer advocate working with healthcare developers needs to understand healthcare technology context, not just general software development. Someone engaging with financial services developers needs to understand the regulatory and technical constraints of that industry. Manufacturing-focused DevRel needs to understand operational technology and industrial systems. This domain knowledge can be learned, but it takes time and genuine engagement with the industry, not just reading a few articles.
When does a company need DevRel?
Not every company needs a dedicated Developer Relations function. For companies that aren’t building developer-facing products or platforms, traditional marketing and support may be sufficient. But there are clear indicators that suggest when investing in DevRel makes sense.
If your product is primarily consumed through APIs, SDKs, or other programmatic interfaces, you likely need DevRel. When developers are your primary users or decision-makers, having people who can engage with them technically becomes essential. This includes companies building platforms that other developers build on, infrastructure tools, developer tools themselves, or APIs that enable integration with other systems.
Technical complexity is another strong indicator. If your product requires significant technical understanding to evaluate and use effectively, DevRel can bridge that gap.
If you’re seeing community formation around your product, that’s a signal you need DevRel. When developers are starting to ask questions in forums, creating their own resources, or discussing your product in technical communities, having someone who can engage authentically and helpfully with those communities becomes valuable. Early community formation is fragile, and the way you engage with it can determine whether it grows into a healthy ecosystem or withers.
For early-stage companies, the question is often whether to hire dedicated DevRel or have engineers do some DevRel activities part-time. This depends on your resources and how central developer relationships are to your growth. Many successful companies started with engineers who enjoyed community engagement doing it part-time, then hired dedicated advocates as they scaled. The advantage of this approach is authenticity: engineers working on the product have deep knowledge and natural credibility. The disadvantage is that DevRel work takes time and focus, and trying to do it part-time while also building the product can mean both suffer.
As you scale, dedicated DevRel becomes more important. When your developer community reaches a size where ad-hoc engagement isn't sufficient, when you’re getting invited to speak at conferences regularly, or when you need someone focused on understanding developer needs and feeding that back to product teams, it’s time to invest in dedicated developer advocates. For complex industries, you might need specialized advocates for different segments or use cases, since the depth of domain knowledge required makes it hard for one person to cover everything effectively.
Measuring Developer Relations success
One of the challenges with DevRel is that traditional marketing metrics don’t capture its value. Measuring DevRel by leads generated or marketing qualified leads (MQLs) misses the point and can actually incentivize the wrong behaviors. Developer advocates who are focused on hitting lead generation targets will shift toward more promotional, less authentic engagement, which undermines the trust that makes DevRel valuable.
Better indicators of DevRel success focus on community health and developer satisfaction. Are developers actively engaging with your content and finding it useful? Are they participating in community forums and helping each other? Are they building interesting things with your product and sharing them? These qualitative signals indicate whether you're creating real value for developers.
Developer satisfaction surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) specifically for developers can be useful metrics. Are developers who interact with your DevRel team more satisfied than those who don’t? Are they more likely to recommend your product? These metrics capture whether DevRel is achieving its core goal of helping developers succeed.
Time-to-first-value metrics can show whether DevRel’s educational content and engagement are helping developers be successful more quickly. If developers who engage with tutorials, attend workshops, or interact with developer advocates get to a working implementation faster than those who don't, that's evidence of DevRel impact.
Long-term metrics matter more than short-term ones for DevRel. Developer retention, meaning how long developers continue using and building with your product, is a key indicator. Word-of-mouth referrals and organic growth from developers recommending your product to peers show that you've built the kind of trust and satisfaction that DevRel aims for. Community contributions, whether that's developers creating their own tutorials, answering each other’s questions, or contributing to open source projects in your ecosystem, demonstrate a healthy community that DevRel has helped nurture.
The quality of feedback that DevRel brings back to the product team is another important, if harder to quantify, measure of success. Is DevRel identifying issues and opportunities that the team wouldn't have found otherwise? Are the insights from developer conversations leading to product improvements that increase satisfaction and retention? This feedback loop value is often invisible in metrics but crucial for long-term product-market fit.
The challenge with attributing revenue directly to DevRel is that its impact is often indirect and long-term. A developer who gets help from a developer advocate in February might recommend your product to their team in June, leading to an enterprise deal in September. The developer advocate’s contribution was real and important, but it doesn’t show up in typical attribution models. Companies that insist on direct revenue attribution for DevRel often end up measuring the wrong things or not investing in DevRel at all.
The compound effect of trust and reputation built through DevRel is real but hard to measure. Developers who trust your company because of positive DevRel interactions are more likely to give your product the benefit of the doubt when evaluating new features, more likely to recommend you to peers, and more likely to remain customers even when competitors appear. This trust is a competitive advantage that compounds over time but doesn't fit neatly into quarterly metrics.
How DevRel supports technical content marketing
Developer Relations and technical content marketing are complementary practices that work best when coordinated. DevRel provides authenticity and technical depth that makes technical content marketing more effective, while technical content marketing provides structure and distribution that amplifies DevRel’s impact.
DevRel teams create some of the most valuable technical content because it comes from hands-on experience. A developer advocate who has helped dozens of developers integrate your API knows exactly where they get stuck, what questions they ask, and what mental models they bring. This direct experience translates into tutorials that anticipate real confusion, documentation that addresses actual use cases, and examples that solve problems developers genuinely face. The content is more useful because it’s informed by authentic engagement rather than assumptions about what developers need.
Developer advocates also surface the real questions developers are asking, which can inform technical content marketing strategy. If DevRel notices that developers consistently struggle with a particular integration pattern, that’s a signal that content addressing that pattern would be valuable. If there’s confusion about how your product fits with certain technologies or frameworks, that suggests a content opportunity. DevRel’s community engagement provides direct insight into what content developers need.
Technical content created by DevRel teams tends to be more honest about limitations and tradeoffs, which actually makes it more trustworthy and effective. Developers appreciate content that acknowledges when something is complex or when there are multiple valid approaches with different tradeoffs. This honesty builds credibility in ways that purely promotional content can't.
The relationship works both ways. Technical content marketing can provide structure for content creation, SEO optimization, and distribution strategies that help DevRel’s content reach more developers. Content marketing teams can help ensure that the excellent technical content DevRel creates is discoverable, well-organized, and amplified through appropriate channels. They can help with content planning so that DevRel efforts align with product launches and business priorities without compromising authenticity.
Conclusion
Developer Relations is an investment in long-term developer relationships rather than short-term lead generation. It’s most valuable for companies building platforms, APIs, or tools that developers depend on, especially in complex industries where technical credibility and domain expertise are crucial for adoption.
The practice sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and marketing, but serves a unique function: helping developers succeed while bringing their needs back to improve the product. This requires technical practitioners who can engage authentically with developer communities, create genuinely useful educational content, and advocate for developer needs inside the company.
Success in DevRel requires giving developer advocates the space to prioritize developer needs over marketing metrics. It means measuring success through community health, developer satisfaction, and long-term relationship building rather than short-term lead generation. It means accepting that the impact is often indirect and compounds over time through trust and reputation.
When done well, DevRel creates a competitive advantage that’s difficult to replicate. Developers who trust your company because of positive DevRel experiences become advocates themselves, recommending your product to peers and remaining loyal even as competitors emerge. This trust and the community it enables can be more valuable than any marketing campaign, but it requires genuine commitment to helping developers succeed on their terms, not just yours.