TL;DR this is a fantastic book that I am recommending to anyone that will listen. A perfect balance of outlining the issues for Developer Relations, putting those issues into the right context in your company, practical / actionable advice, and sprinkled with field interviews that back up all of the points.
Background: About 5 years ago, I left academia (research computing, large scale genomics data) and into industry with the mission to move the field to leverage the cloud more. Needless to say, their were no guideposts and by necessity we made made things up as we went along. A lot of mistakes were made, but we learned from those and kept at it. Eventually our group closely resembled what this book describes as a Developer Advocate group, but with a larger component of outbound market development activities. I am very proud of the work we did and largely we succeeded in transforming the genomics community to embrace cloud, which allows for every scientist, not just those at leading institutions with $$$$ to have world-class HPC centers, to work with petabytes of data and make novel discoveries.
One item that we never tackled well, however, was engaging the internal stakeholders to convince them that our core mission of shaping and growing the market were valuable in and of themselves, and we kept getting measured by direct sales contributions, or confused as pre-sales engineers. Needless to say, the group was underwent about 4 re-orgs during my time there and eventually I left the team, which was shortly disbanded after that.
The practical advice and the language used in this book would have saved us a lot of pain if we could have clearly communicated the business value of a group like ours to the broader business. Personally, reading the book allowed me some self-reflection and a framework to analyze just what went wrong, and how I can structure my initiatives in the future. I am already implementing some of the guidance and can already see the difference in understanding in the new group I am a part of now.
So thanks for the book! I just wish I had it 5 years ago ;-)
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Deep and accessible survey of many aspects of DevRel
There's definitely something in this book for every current or future developer relations pro. I'm quoted in the book (caveat) along with 25+ other folks to give you an idea of the depth (and breadth) of the research that Mary's done here. My favorite chapter is #5 about building a dream-team style DevRel organization but I think #2 will be the most important for many readers - how to sell community to your company. The whole book gets you 10 chapters of wisdom from Mary and many folks in the space - highly recommend!
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Top reviews from other countries
Phani
It's a basic 101 on how a department needs to work - Dont recommend
Reviewed in India on March 11, 2022
Ale Borba
Um dos melhores livros sobre Developer Relations que eu já li
Reviewed in Brazil on April 22, 2019