DaShaun became a great devrel by developing a new way to work with our community. I’ve seen it pay off in all ways, big time. Here is his key differentiation for devrel.
The business if devrel:
There’s more to developer advocacy than just conferences and content. The real thing that companies [that hire devrel] want, is they want to see it move the needle. They want to see us driving adoption, or driving sales, or driving perceptions, or sentiment. We’ve got to move the needle.
DaShaun’s office hours technique:
We set up regularly scheduled weekly calls with customers. These calls are typically small groups, sometimes larger depending on the topic, and are scheduled for one hour. We actually have an agenda for it: News, Roadmap Updates, Demo/Presentation, and Q&A.
What’s key is that this hour a week per customer is for people from that customer only. This lets/gets people to open up and get more involved.
This high-touch model only works with large accounts, of course. If you have tens of thousands of customers, you can’t meet with them. You have to do only broadcast.
And, yes, it means much better feedback into the company about customer needs.
After 30 years, I’m a crotchety, often burned-out devrel person, and working with over the past few years has inspired me to be de-crotchify just enough to keep sane.
DaShaun is a canny devrel and his work over the past two years has helped out a lot for both selling software, keeping customers, and helping developers do better work. This is his secret sauce.