Item — HN Reader

Making the docs great is often part of what DevRel is meant to do.

ZIRP or no ZIRP, technical people are more respected now and are more often decision makers. I think irrespective of market dynamics, it's more common now for a CTO to be an ex-developer and not just someone who knows how to manage budgets.

This means that any technical product still needs to work on presentation in a non-superficial way. You can't just have copywriters writing "X is the best platform. It's so good. It will solve all your problems", and make sales based on that. You also need great getting started docs, migration docs, explanations and guides. Even before people are actively using those things, they are looking at them and evaluating them to decide whether to buy into your product/platform or your competitor's.

[Disclaimer, I own Ritza a company that offers this as a service, so probably I am biased, but we are seeing pretty strong demand still. So I agree with the article that a lot of the 'do it because everyone else is doing it' parts of DevRel are probably dead, but the need for people who operate at the intersection of tech/sales/marketing is well established now and will exist in some form as long as there are technical companies selling technical products).

1 comments

I totally agree. If anyone has tried to hire a technical product marketer who "gets it," they will understand there is a really small group of people who have the technical understanding and ability to communicate beyond "X is the best platform." Sometimes early stage companies think their engineers will be able to do it, but often it is not true. They need someone who both sees the internal AND external view of things.

I actually started at DevRel and quickly understood that if you swap writing blog posts for writing whitepapers and website copy, you can easily make significantly more money.

Also, better and more understood KPIs - if I made this really good solution diagram and slapped it on a one-pager that I templated, and then the AE sent it to a customer and it made a sale move 1.2x faster, that's tangible results.

And the numbers don't even have to be insane; I remember building a dashboard as a head of DevRel that was made entirely out of vanity metrics. Today, I don't even make dashboards anymore - the results of my sales collateral are simply evident by the pipeline moving forward.

Also, I'm sorry to say, but so many DevRels are primadonnas - they won't go on sales calls, but they'll go to conferences. If they don't go to a conference every month, then they're not "getting what they came here for". Demand generation is beneath them, since "I don't look at leads, I'm building a community". Bleh.

Much better to work with people - as cutthroat as they may be - who push me to create better content that drives results.

Also led me to creating my first productized service - https://syntaxcinema.dev - and that's been going very well for me recently.