Building a vibrant developer community is hard. It doesn’t have to be.

I am a developer by background, having spent years building apps in Java, Ruby, React, Python, and IOS, and Swift. Along the way, I found that the thing I love the most is combining my education in Organizational Learning & Behavior with coding to help teach other developers how to build apps, and help organizations build great developer experiences and vibrant, engaged developer communities.

I have helped build some of the world’s leading developer communities for Salesforce, Heroku, and Twilio, growing their size into the millions. I can help design an engagement strategy for your company that keeps an authentic developer voice, without the marketing spin.

Don’t know what, or how, Developer Relations can help you? I think of it this way, and started The DevRel Collective to help companies increase PLG and engagement with developers by focusing on great developer experiences.

When approaching Developer Relations and working with clients, I frequently look at it through the following phases:

Awareness

Making developers aware of your product is critical. I have years of experience writing thought leadership content that marketing can use to place on popular trade sites and tech outlets to get your brand known. Here is a list of some of the content I have written for Forbes, TechCrunch, Infoworld, The Guardian, and much more.

Adoption

Once developers know about your product, it’s time to help them get started and onboarded as quickly as possible. I spent a lot of my time writing demos, code samples, getting started guides, and tutorials to help developers learn your product. I start by researching the developer lifecycle and milestones, and defining learning paths and nurture flows to help them get up and running as quickly as possible. For example, when ThoughtSpot launched their developer platform I wrote demos and tutorials for all the major developer personas we wanted to target. You can read more about ThoughtSpot here.

Engagement

Once developers are onboarded, I work on ensuring the come back and keep using your product. The best way to do this is via code snippets, client libraries, SDKs, and workshops. Now that they have the basics of using your platform, I targeted extended use cases to ensure they continue to be productive and have a great experience. Throughout this process I weave in community activation, ensuring that developers have a place to ask questions, and a conduit back to product management. At Twilio, we built the CodeExchange to make it easy for developers to find the code snippets they needed to get their job done.

Retention

Retention is often overlooked, especially when your community is growing. Establishing metrics such as last API call, number of calls in x days etc help you identify potential attrition problems. I work with clients to establish these metrics and implement nurture programs to ensure we help developers who are stuck before they attrit. At Ready Player Me, I created lifecycle milestone metrics based on Amplitude product data, and served this into HubSpot to allow me to automate nurture flows. You can read more about ReadyPlayerMe here.

Advocacy

The key to a vibrant community is to turn developers into your best advocates. I work with community teams to overlay tools such as CommonRoom to identify champions in the community and empower they to continue to spread their experiences and support other developers to succeed. I’ve established champion programs, developer councils to provide direct feedback to product teams, grown user groups to millions at Salesforce, and created affiliate programs to help developers earn revenue.

If any of these phases sound like what you need to help grow your developer community, reach out, I’d be happy to help.