👋 Welcome! This is my first post for my Day in the Life series. Let me tell you about the series before we dive in. I firmly believe that if I can share what I do and why I do it, others can learn from my experience more quickly than they can reading blog posts and books about DevRel. I don't know everything, but I surely have a great way of problem-solving and figuring it out, and have been exposed to 100's of developer programs and coach many DevRel practitioners.
I'm excited to kick off this series where I will be writing about my day. Just raw, transparent insights into what it's like being a Developer Relations leader, advisor, and coach.
2023 End-of-Year Recap
I had a fabulous day honestly. I kicked it off by facilitating a brief discovery session to identify the key areas of impact my team had in 2023 so I could share a team end-of-year recap and how we contributed to company and team OKRs.
Wanna hear about some of the exciting things we accomplished?!
- Support requests went down 31% MoM in 2023
- Our team was responsible for the resources and platforms that caused the deflection, we are not responsible for support.
- Our avg response time in our forum went from 99 hours to 22 hours—73% improvement
- Advocating for developer feedback led to major product improvements & resources that supported not only developers, but our managed partners too
- Captured the eyes of over 8,000 prospects through outreach efforts
- Collected ~150 DevRel Qualified Leads, most of which we converted
- Increased our inbound pipeline by 75%
These are all exciting for a multitude of reasons. In 2023, our team was focused on developer experience improvements and slight pipeline growth. In preparation for 2024, where growth and outreach is going to be our main focus. We needed to be ready for the growth and also needed to ensure that developers had a good experience when coming to our platforms. We have a lot of work left to do, but I'd say we rocked it in 2023. 🎉
2024 Strategy Review with Leadership
I've been working on our 2024 team strategy and had my presentation with executive leadership. It went well. I received some great feedback thats going to improve our impact for 2024. I have a follow-up to present our prioritization exercise, allowing leadership to see what our two-person team can and cannot accomplish due to resource limitations.
My slides were in this order:
- 2023 Wins
- 2024 Opportunities
- Key Priorities
- Target Audiences
- Measuring Success
- How We'll Drive Impact (our activities and actual work)
- What's Next
Building a Custom CRM
I'll talk about this A LOT this year so I wont explain it now, but the summary is, we have no way to track developers or partners and understand where they are in the journey or even just data around what they're building. It's all in spreadsheets with no automation or reporting available. So we started building a custom CRM and project mgmt platform in Airtable. I didn't get to do any fun building today though, I was just cleaning up data and aligning accuracy to the data structure.
Event Invite List v0
We have an invite-only partner event coming up and I was tasked with determining which of our developer partners should be invited. Bringing this kind of a list together is no simple task. Sure, I could invite anyone that seems great, but there is a method to the madness here.
Our event is intended to showcase our products possibilities and new features. Therefore, we want to invite developers or partners that are going to drive an impact and leverage our products in 2024. So I need to find the happy balance between inviting our amazing current partners, while also ensuring I'm inviting partners that will build with us in the future and help us grow.
Oh, you'll hear me say partners a lot. I'm actually on the "sales" team, aka Partnership team. And I LOVE it. I manage our developer partners.
Q4 Self-Review Discovery
I started collecting notes, metrics, and examples of work to showcase in my self-review for Q4. I haven't been my best self since having my little guy, so I haven't had the chance to do this for my manager yet this year and its something I always like to do. If you're like me and bragging about your work is hard, these are incredibly important. It's your way of showing your manager what you did that they might not have even noticed. It's also incredibly helpful for them to kick off their manager reviews when they have a self-review to work from.
Decoding DevX Prep Call
I co-host a livestream with Katie Miller and PJ Metz each week called Decoding DevX and we connect every Thursday before the livestream to discuss what we'll cover ahead of time.
I also worked alongside PJ to help draft an example lesson plan like framework for DevRel practitioners to leverage that we'll mention in the livestream this week.
This one was much longer than I'm planning for in the future, but hopefully these Day in the Life ramblings drive an impact in YOUR life!
Until next time,
Tessa
