DevRel communities: Hear it from @Ankita Mishra

What is Developer Relations (DevRel)?

The word DevRel is the short form of the term Developer Relations. So what are the roles and responsibilities of a Developer Relations manager? A DevRel is an umbrella term that intersects with the marketing, developer, and product team. This section makes sure that the relationship between these 3 sections in a company is healthy. DevRel communities are on the rise in today’s world and covid has helped ignite it by making things virtual.  

The rise of community in this niche has been creating a lot of impacts and when something is buzzing a lot, we tend to have a lot of questions around it. But we were fortunate to have Ankita Mishra, a DevRel Community manager to dissect and explain things around a DevRel community.

Wanna take a peek at all the insights, answers, and tips given by DevRel community manager Ankita Mishra, check out here!

Decoding Developer  communities

There are a ton of things that people aim for in a community. A DevRel community again has expectations attached to it like, how could startups use Developer communities? What can its metrics be? How to increase productivity in a community? And a lot more, but here’s where it gets exciting, all these are not tough questions like the existence of God, a well-experienced person like Ankita has the perfect answer to all these.

So here are the magic mantras… all communities have their own advantages according to their purpose and for a startup “the only answer is growth”. A startup aims to grow successfully and stand in the market by competing with the already existing competitors. And a community can carry the startup in its success steps.

A startup has this period where it goes through a lot of evolution to become what it has to be in the future and a community can help the process of evolution to be right by giving valuable feedback, in terms of the product and features. This practice of getting constant feedback from users has another perk, the users build a relationship with the brand and feel that they are part of it, as they truly are part of it in shaping the product with their feedback and insights.

“Be it any startup, retention is really important so if the users become members through the community, retention is possible because this gives each one of them the motivation to learn and code faster,” says Ankita to prove that a startup has quite a lot of valuable advantages in terms of growth from a community.

Measuring Success of Developer community

A thriving Developer community can be measured with the help of User retention, engagement rate, acquisition, and feedback that includes happy customer stories. On the other hand, it will give a shout-out to how the community is working. Apart from these aspects, things like email open rate, social media activity, event participation, and proactive people in the community can tell the community success story.

With metrics and their results in hand, how to make it even more productive next in the search, good encouragement, and motivation can make the community members continuously contribute and be active in the community and who holds the biggest role in accomplishing this? A Community manager. When this is practiced the community starts to be productive.

As a community, it does seem to bring a great deal to the company, this being said it doesn’t fail to help the individual striving developers in the community too. A community serves to be a space for people to put up ideas and experiment with them, and for a developer, it sets the stage to put out what’s hidden within. It helps the developers to create an identity for themselves, and this when being noticed will pave the way for them to get a job and a career.

After all, every product is built aiming to help other people and a community’s sole purpose is nothing different. A person who has hands-on experience in it, with no doubt will become a successful developer, contributing to making other’s life easy. This combo of tech skills and the zeal to help others is deadly!

"Every single impact matters"

Goals are the foundation to create impact. Setting goals are crucial and they determine the path of a community, these set of goals usually are set by the Community Manager and the Organization together having in mind their OKRs and KPIs.

When it comes to a community it is not the same community after 10 years or maybe in 5 years, it keeps evolving and that is what makes it amazing. These phases that the community goes through are essential and there is no way we can skip this step.

There are a ton of difficulties that the community will have to face but holding onto the core value that is to help others will take the community through all the hurdles that come by. It is not the numbers that speak out loud but the impact it creates in each person.  The impacts are the ones that a person should be taking into account, every single impact in the community matters.

A community is successful when it creates impacts on individuals’ life, be it a DevRel or any other community; all those are successful when it can create an impact on individuals.

AMAs are very helpful in creating a healthy, successful, community and we love and do anything that will help a community so we have promised ourselves to create an AMA with experienced folks every Wednesday at our community.

Got anything in mind for AMA or wanna pour out your questions? Hit us right away.