DevRel Roundtable episode 1: Tessa Mero and Domitrius Clark

i was at a bar drinking of course that's where you'll find me at most conferences after hours sometimes during i'm just kidding i never said that cut that out all right would you ask something else it shall not be cut out hello what is up welcome back to the channel so this is the first episode of the death rail round table i am actually starting this series because all around me in the community i see a lot of amazing people turning to become a developer relations person or developer advocacy or whatever you want to call it an avocado i would say and i am seeing so many cool people do this and i don't actually know anything about it i am someone who has been for like 15 years being a developer being a tech director at agencies but not at a product company so we've never really needed a developer relations person and you know what it's a really valid job nowadays and i think it's super cool that a lot of senior people go towards this so in this episode i am talking to demetrius and tessa from cloudanary they are two veteran developer relations people and i'm just asking whatever is on my my chest just i need to learn what this thing is and so without further ado this is episode 1 of the death rail run table let's go hello and welcome dom and tessa how are you wonderful that's yeah i didn't know if i should answer first because i feel like me and tessa are just going to be stepping over each other the whole time so i'm going to let tessa lead on almost all of these we can um be in sync with our answers we can say we're going to say three two one great you're gonna owe me a lot of sodas because i'm gonna jinx because you work at the same company you do a similar job right uh i mean we work together in different areas but we overlapped projects yeah we overlap a lot i i think that that's like one of the the misconceptions about devrel in the first place is that like everybody kind of just makes content and and speaks it at conferences and like that's literally 20 you know if that i think of a devrel's job okay this is what i want to know because this is part of why we're kind of doing this video because i honestly don't know much about deaf role and especially because i'm kind of old school i've i'm grown up and at ad agencies doing coding and for some reason when you do that you feel like that's the real job but that's obviously there's way more out there but so what i did i did ui for for four and a half years so i totally yeah exactly so you kind of like i've heard people around me saying okay i'm just gonna jump into being a deaf girl and then i said yeah but you don't have any agency experience which is of course a stupid comment but i just didn't know so maybe you guys can elaborate a little bit on yeah what the devil actually is yeah i'll let you take that first tessa and i'll just yeah so i i so here's here's the initial issue i'm going back like prior to developer relations you have a developer developer driven product and then you have a marketing team that's specific on marketing that are that don't really have a face to each person they're they're putting out marketing materials to developers but none of them have developer backgrounds they don't really take in feedback they just push out content so they're really focused on yeah they're focused on customers and in a way where they're not building any kind of relationship developer relations is about building relationships with developers and having a face to each person on the team and and taking in that feedback talking to people being the face being a leader in in different communities and and just being out there among a million other things well yeah i guess because what i'm looking at where i work right now our output to you know the community is mostly broadcast right we have a new project or do this without announcement based yeah but there's no interaction whatsoever so is that maybe the crux of what the death rail does on top of whatever like to pile on top of what tesla was saying like what devrel really does in my opinion is removes friction from the product uh and that's and that's anywhere right like what what what you see a lot is the community work that's that's us at conferences in communities giving answers in forums wherever you find us that's like that's what the community sees and it's understandable why a a lot of companies already think like that's just what devrel does that's what i'm gonna hire you for and that's b why a lot of community members think like oh you're it's kind of like a custer customer support thing to them like they they know that they can dm me or or reach out to like get an answer for something and if i don't have it i'll find it but the whole other like like dark side of the moon almost is that we also remove friction internally so not only are we making it so that the developers can use it easily we're helping try and drive the product towards being something that those developers want we're helping talk to marketing about the types of content that they want to see we're helping talk to the executives about the the type of direction that the product should be going like there's a lot of internal work that goes on alongside all of this content this content isn't just driven to to make you understand the product it's it's in a way to kind of receive feedback as candidly as we can and try and shape the product around that feedback and and we build stuff too like you always see devrel building things and and small projects and stuff like that it's because we want to find what what sucks about the product too like to me when i when i first did my interview for clattonary i wasn't like yo your product is amazing i just want to work for it the first thing i did was find where i thought the product was weak and brought that as like hey if i came on this is what i would want to help empower and and for me that was the graphql like for cloudinary there's not much in the graphql screen so exactly i was i was heavy in apollo i loved apollo at the time so i actually and it's in my github but i have like a rapper for clattonary in graphql so to me that's what a devrel does it's not delivering you all of the the hype and the and the excitement like i want to find the things that like suck and make them better and and and if and if we can't make them better it should be my job to help you find that as a customer even if that's not our product like i think that it's really important to to really help the community like when you've got strictly product driven people who just don't care about your success like you're gonna feel that that's when it becomes marketing you know yeah so um do you feel like to an extent maybe for utes that you at one point might become a referee i mean between teams that use the product and maybe your developers or like because i've seen this in other companies where basically they release a new piece of software which is potentially great but actually it's not or not yet anyways it has a cool idea but then we use this in production on a global scale and it just fails so we actually my first touch point would be a death rail where i say hey your product is there's something up here we can just not make this happen and kind of they told me they kind of feel like a referee between the product teams and the testers and so do you guys have the same feeling it it depends on what exactly the kind of feedback is if it's a complaint on something that isn't clear or not working correctly um and especially as deborah we really care about this feedback like that there's a reason why they're giving they're not just like having a bad day and and want to complain to someone this it's a genuine feedback that we should um take an initiative and and make a change and bring this feedback on it and see what what can we do on our end to make it easier for them because if one person has a complaint about something there's more than one person there's probably a lot more and not everyone is vocal about it and i always i'm very grateful when someone's vocal about any kind of issues that they're having yeah a product isn't uh isn't always going to be doing what's right like you know a product can be living for 10 to 20 years and have started in one place and now you know we always talk about how fast development moves right like you know the javascript ecosystem joke because there's a new framework every day but to that point like your product has to keep pace with these ecosystems and when you start to believe that your product fit has already been found and that there's nothing more to gain from the the newer ecosystems because you've already found your niche like you start to slip so i think that like devrel helps you keep the the finger on the pulse of what is actually happening in the communities not just what is happening at your enterprise level right and yeah we can kind of fixing we keep up with any kind of trends that's going on what people are discussing in different developer communities and and trying to get ahead rather than falling behind and then and trying to catch up yeah if you guys haven't ever had like any kind of challenges with this community related stuff because for example on my side i've once written like a piece of best practices or something about a piece of software i use and devrel saw that and actually kind of asked me to change some things in the stuff that i wrote and we have a great relationship so i decided you know what i'll just write down that the company asked me to change it but i did change it of course this was still quite positive but have you guys ever seen that somebody writes like some really bad stuff or is just like who has maybe a big community around them and then actually say things that are wrong like if you guys had these kind of war stories basically or are you lucky enough that you work in a great place where this doesn't happen i i have seen stuff like that from especially a previous company and that's kind of when our community manager slash marketing jumped in and that they would handle um conversations like that um but that was a major company yeah even with cloudinary like even with cloudinary there's all the time you know it's a large product number one number two when you walk into somewhere like amazon right like there's so many services there's so there's so many facets in which you can misconstrue that you could put out content that that generally hits the nail on the head but has a couple of misgivings and really like that's not your fault that that to me is is a is a product problem is a is a documentation or a dx problem and that's where i find like you know i don't think it's our job to come in and be like hey like you're wrong you should change this but educating like finding a way to educate that person is is totally within the realm of our job and it's totally something we've had to deal with i've been with cloud9 for about eight months now and and we've definitely had you know certain reviews or or things that were off and and honestly those types of things are what help us drive change in the company because maybe that's something that a lot of people get wrong and so why why is that right so if i look at it in the opposite perspective i'm the one that put out a piece of content and then some employee from that product posts a comment saying oh you're you're doing it wrong it needs to be this way like i would feel uh slightly insulted like with them trying to sound smarter or look better if they contacted me in private i should have a way to be contacted and say hey i want to make some corrections and and just you know help you out i'm not sure if you are aware of this here's some links and here's this updated information and be like wow thank you like i'll update this right now i really appreciate that feedback i i wasn't sure on that end but but now i i feel confident about it thank you and then we can go back internally and be like hey this person went all through this stuff and couldn't find this answer why is that right and then that allows us to so like you know this is going to move into my other point we are a bridge between teams so you know how you would said are we the referee uh between teams no no we serve as the bridge i want to be able to go and have a connection so like my big thing coming into cloud9 was how do i start connecting with the other teams that wouldn't expect to deal with me so that would be docs uh training and you know we're in marketing so in clatenary we are under the marketing umbrella so like when people think of us they're just like oh like they're they're on the marketing team but little do they know like you know we're using the product a bunch we're building like open source tools on top of the product like we have just as much engineering know-how as you would expect a community member to have and it's something that duran always says you know we're customer zero we should be able to understand and know the product at customer level so like that should be any devrel like any devrel should have a pretty working knowledge of their technology and be able to use it as a customer would right because that's the only way that you're gonna find these problems so if you act as the bridge when when something comes up online that's like that and we can come back and be like hey this might be a documentation issue can we figure out in the docs where to make this clearer and then documentation is like oh i didn't even think of it that way like good catch like those are the it's not so much as a referee it's a bridge so that we can start moving our way closer to the product to where we can say hey you know when a new release is coming out let us know first this is how we should roll it out these are how let's get some beta testers let's you know what i mean like we we are the connection the link between your product and the community and anymore it's not about the it okay money is always going to be made at the enterprise level b2b is always going to be a way that that almost every company operates but realistically nowadays your product is for software engineers so beyond the whole b2b sales person to salesperson we need to be able to have those conversations about what this looks like for the individual developer and if it doesn't look right for the individual developer it's never going to skyrocket itself up to being an enterprise level tool nice okay so people listen this is what it's supposed to be um it's it's persuading people to listen because people don't they don't you know they don't know that you are a subject matter expert enough to be taking that advice from so it's really building trust okay that's a good end when you work for a medium to larger company and then you're a developer advocate you get feedback about something random maybe it's related to an educational course and i have to um provide feedback to the education team maybe it's a comment about the pricing page so i have to just jump into and then contact the pricing team and they've never heard my name before or or you know it might be the first time i'm ever contacting anyone on that team and then having to work with them and and and convince them to make these changes so communication is a huge factor even though i just interrupted you no that's fine because actually it goes into a point i wanted to ask about because it goes into career path right so when you're a junior developer you can become a senior developer or you can become a tech manager stuff like that of course when you're a deaf real there might be different levels a little bit because i know your boss is also essentially developer relations person but like above you but would you think that would it be better if you are maybe already like in the community and doing a lot of work there like for example my profile now i am like a director of web development at an agency i do a bunch in the community would it then be better for me now to become a deaf rail because a bunch of people know me already or doesn't that matter at all is it like i don't know it's it's so new to me this job i don't actually know what that means it wholly mattered for me like that was the only reason i even got uh the opportunities to interview uh was because i had a hold on the community um i ran react adelphia for two years uh i was like heavy in the philly community so i'm i'm in philadelphia so for me like you know it was empowering my city and and finding ways to empower the people in my city that i was like really focused on not so much like what it could do for me and then you know eventually i started talking to people who were in devrel and they were like you're literally doing the job of what a devrel would be doing because i was putting out a lot of content for apollo at the time i was doing workshops i had just become an egghead instructor so like i was very involved in this kind of community aspect and then realized like oh like there's a job that that that does that same thing and even even that though like i i had a few interviews before cloudenary that even my experience in the community wasn't enough it was like you know but i also think it's hard because there's no real junior developer advocate devrel oh you have to be a senior i guess that doesn't exist not yet it's going to be a big thing in the future though apollo is actually uh planning on in their new quarter to start hiring junior devrel so it is going to become a thing i think oh for sure tessa what do you think about that uh for junior development yeah for example or i so so here's here's the issue with hiring junior denver rules right right now it's like for the last five to ten years it's still such a new type of position where uh tech companies are starting to realize like i can generate more revenue over time i can become a more successful company if we have a deborah denver team does make an impact maybe you can't see that in your kpis immediately but it does make a a long-term great effect and but people want to hire experienced ones they're they're looking to hire the first you know five people the first few people that are senior level or mid-level or above they want someone to direct them on what they should be yeah they don't know we're in that stage right they don't know what they do most companies they they know that every big company that's successful has a devrel team and they want one because it looks like they're doing the right thing but you know i don't i don't think that there's an established like normal you know if if it's a random tech companies that that just throws together devrel team it's it's there's a chance it's gonna fail you have to have some like serious initiatives you have to have a strategy that aligns with company goals you have to have an actual plan going on and and and uh someone that's leading you that understands what developer relations is not just let's just hire 20 people real quick and just okay we have deborah now let's hire three people to run an entire org like let's be real that's really what's happening here honestly don't even consider someone being junior or hiring a bunch of people who don't even know the product or i was thinking of a specific company who said we need to hire 40 deverell in the next i think too you've also got to take into consideration the companies that are doing it really well and the companies that are doing it really well like twilio uh all sierra i think does a great job netlify obviously i mean just a powerhouse like and the things that they do right is instead of looking at devrel as a umbrella under an organization dx as an org piece is is kind of the lead so instead of devrel being under marketing it's under dx which then is a umbrella that handles all things community for developers right like that's that's really the pinnacle of what devrel is and you've only seen a few companies do it uh and i think what the problem is is that it's it's hard to trust that creating a new organization is going to be a net positive so a lot of companies aren't there yet uh but the companies who have gone all in and done that sort of reorganization have done an amazing job and it shows because what happens is you start to see how many teams are adjacent to devrel and that is the training team when you've got training what if your training isn't relevant to today's ecosystem then what does it matter and if you're not talking to the people who are in that current ecosystem you're never going to know then you've got you've got uh you know you've got documentation that's like the number one thing that i'm going to be asked about as a developer relations person is people are going to be coming and asking about where on the docks they can find stuff and how they're supposed to do things so i have to know the documentation really well which means i'm going to be talking to the documentation team a bunch so like having those types of kind of champions within those teams that understand that working with devrel is a net positive for that team starts to show that devrel as an organization starts to make more sense dx makes more sense as its own kind of umbrella cool i like it so now because this job is still quite new right how are the salaries compared to let's say senior developers because i can assume or i am assuming now that deveral people are likely more senior than a lot of developers because of their communication skills all of that stuff right so how are salaries compared to let's say your previous tech jobs i could take that first oh yeah so i went from like i said i did ui for a few years uh i was just like at the breaking point of senior um and my last job as a ui engineer was at comcast and my salary has stayed about the same uh if not a little more because of perks as i've moved over um but i'd say any time i've had a conversation about a job in devrel from what salaries i had in in ui it's been it's been relatively like the same it's if not if not more depending because you're you are getting a bunch more responsibility a bunch more singular leadership like i think there's a lot more that comes with going from a team facet where you're you know under a pm and you're delivering on schedules that your features need to be out on to then going and having to kind of create your own version of what a win looks like and and then expand that out right and then you're starting to think about like like you said what are the what are the organizational like jumps like is there a regular devrel senior devrel and then there's vp of devrel and then there's vp of like developer experience like i've seen all of these these happen and uh to our earlier point of like what a junior looks like i think junior devrel is really easy right now because what junior devrel is is exactly all of the things that you see at devrel doing content creation understanding how to live stream like uh tailwind uh just picked up simon and simon is you know working on getting the live stream up and going writing blog posts getting answers like those are small facets of a devrel that you can start to train somebody in that that starts to handle like um we have somebody on our team belage who does a lot of our ops and he in turn in helping us like organize and collect all of the data that we need to is learning how to be a devrel he's learning how you know what content looks like and what influencers in the space look like and things like that so i think that very soon is going to become an established kind of route that you can start junior to mid to senior um it just really depends on like the outlook of how far you're willing to look if you're looking small and a junior you're thinking like content when you're looking at that medium level you're thinking like okay starting to bridge the gaps internally what is organizing a community look like things like that then at the senior level it's like okay what type of content is going out across the team what type of wins do we need for the executives to start to understand our importance like those are those are the kind of trickle-down things that you start to see as generalizations as to where a junior to a senior could could start to differentiate okay you see you're starting to get very well said yeah so i was going to say the same same thing yeah i looked in your eyes tessa and i was like i'm stealing everything she's weird now i'm just gonna quickly give you another question no i'm just kidding so um how did you become a deaf relative i started as a web application developer i just graduated from college and got a degree and certification and built a bunch of projects 10 years ago and then just started applying for a bunch of jobs and ended up being uh getting a salary offered to be a full-time developer to a ski and snowboard company and little did i know i was the only hire and they promised to hire a whole big team that never happened three years of being a solo developer building out things that are so complex above my skill level it was the most i think i've lost so much sleep and wondered if i was gonna have a job the next day almost every day during all those years because of all the um the feature asks that i didn't know how to do it was just mostly a lot of reading a lot of forum reading forum posts and and getting more mentors and i'm sure yeah a lot which is how i started getting involved in communities then i started like i just feel like i don't have enough information in my brain there's these programming meetups like i i discovered and there's i asked my boss can you send me to some conferences like i just need more information and i see some talks at this conference that actually will help with with the features that you're asking for then i started going to events and then i went to my first conference and like have you ever contribute to are you on any open source teams i'm like what the heck is open source like dude we're looking for volunteers like people volunteer like why would i volunteer like you know what i'll just grab your email and we'll talk about it later i didn't want to be rude and i got convinced to join an open source team five years later i was still working on that project so it was a lot of being part of communities and and going to so many meetups to the point where people are asking hey do you want to organize this meetup and be part of the team and i started running all these meetups and running my own meetings and running my own conferences and then started speaking at many conferences and and then i was at a bar drinking of course that's where you'll find me at most conferences after hours sometimes during i'm just kidding i never said that cut that out all right would you ask something else and and his name is mike stowe he's well known in the developer community and and he said to me um like you know everything that you're doing now like you can be a developer advocate like or a developer evangelist oh the the words are used the same and i'm like what is that and i i started doing research and i'm like oh maybe i could be that job like i'm voluntarily doing a lot of this work already i would be so cool to be paid for this for something that i i love doing and i'm like okay now what i don't know what to do so i reached out to some developer evangelists at google and message them and saying hey if you have like a moment to like would love to like learn how you got into your role so i got a mentoring session by them like okay create a personal site start building your brand start writing blog posts try to engage as much as you can on social media with you know speakers and and influencers and i just started focusing on that like every single day and then i started applying for jobs and landed one pretty quickly so that was a fast path to devrel yeah for me for me that for me that person was jason langsdorff he literally like he literally paved the way for me to understand what and that's why i take a a bit of a different approach i think to deverale than than some do uh i don't really write blog posts i don't have a personal site and you know i just i put out videos i did a lot of meetup talks i had my own meetups so that helped but he really started to teach me like kind of the counterpoint to what people start to think devrel is which is just the content right he's like you just you have to be somebody that people trust he's like and at some point if you're an online like people are going to know you're an yeah you know there's no there's no hiding from being a non-trustable individual he's like so he's like be as as you know directly you as you can be be involved in the conversations and i'll tell you what i followed that advice and it's been it's been the best advice since and he's been uh such a great mentor and friend that you know that that's what i tell people all the time you know it's not always about having the thousands of followers and and being an influencer it's about being somebody that people think of to trust in a scenario you know like oh i have to put together a meet like for me it was meetups like i was running a remote meetup before covid um so like everybody came to me how do i run a discord how do i live stream my meetup stuff like that so i was known and trusted for the thing that i was doing so people started to trust me for more than that and i continued to prove my trust in the in the community i really love how this uh both both your stories are slightly different than what a lot of developers do right they just go to work they are in a team they do some scrum they complain you know that that normal thing and you both actually explain that you make your own career you have chosen certain things and because of that you are now super successful and this is what i say in multiple videos of on my channel actually that you have so much influence yourself over what you do so i feel like i just got two mentors um potentially i'm always happy i tell you what time any time and and to that point though i i was privileged in the fact that i had the extra time to do that i don't have a family yet like it for me for tessa it's like she had a family and all of this stuff and was still doing it so she's much more kick-ass than i am i had all the time in the world because it was just me you know me and my girlfriend i don't i don't have any obligations that were stopping me you you reminded me i had a family shoot it's been years it's been years right yeah but um you know so to anybody that's listening that's like well i just don't have the time for that i don't have the time to put in uh my best advice there is to just get involved in communities go lurk in the good communities that you found for me i'm always gonna say for everybody to join party corgi the party cory community is run by chris busgardy tans down the best community i've ever been a part of it shows me new things every day uh go there be a lurker you don't even have to be involved all the time be a lurker see what other people are i'm a lurker yeah it's it's not about it's not about being the loudest in the room i know as being the loudest in the room it's not always about being the loudest in the room it's really about just being involved and and and being around uh the things that people when you see other people doing things successfully it motivates you to do things towards your own success so um you know just get involved where you can and and don't don't worry about the numbers on twitter i have like 2k followers which to some may seem like a lot to some may seem like absolutely nothing to me you know it doesn't seem like that big and i'm not i don't want the 10k the 20k the 50k because first of all then that's so stressful and everybody's gonna be in my comments yelling at me all the time but but to be that like i know that the people that do follow me are following me because they actually want to be there they want to be engaged they want to have communication and and to me that's more important than being an influencer or or any of the stuff that i feel like most people think that devrel is is like you're just a paid influencer and and to me that's not it like i remember actually one of the questions that you would send over was um you know is it less coding a lot of people look at devrel like uh i'm not even gonna be able to code anymore like that's such a that is that is not the case it's your choice it's your choice you work on what your strengths are and as long as the whole team is balanced yep you do what you love and you're going to have people who like like tessa runs the mde program she's great at community leadership and things of that nature that's what she focuses on to me you'll always see when i'm announced somewhere i call myself an advocate engineer some people call it developer evangelist engineer or you know there's a bunch of names for it but to me like and i told duran this right when i when i was interviewing like hey look like i want to code like that's what i enjoy doing that's what i'm good at i can stand up apps quick i can build things fast like i can learn new technologies that's what i want to do and since then i've opened two open source projects while at cloud and area that i've been able to work on and and moved through so one thing i have learned is you have to be very clear where you want to want your focus to be during your interview or else you're going to have like the wrong expectations and things can go south quickly so be very clear yeah let those wise words be remembered yes because yes remember everybody now i really want to thank both of you for taking the time we are already like 35 minutes in it's going to be a fun edit for youtube you know what there's been so much golden nuggets in this i'm just going to probably run the whole thing and i really want to thank you for for joining me and taking the time out of your busy days and yeah thanks and i'll see you next time thank you so much for having us see ya bye