Search for a command to run...
Lessons learned (often the hard way 😅) in Year 1 of DAC
No comments yet. Be the first to comment.
Here's a series of lessons learned the hard way from 25+ years in the DevRel/Community space.
Forging awesome team culture through dreadfully boring stuff ;-)
Making sure your coding agent is not confidently full of *@#^
Forging awesome team culture through dreadfully boring stuff ;-)
Embedding DevRel for a happier and more impactful team
Here are some thoughts if you ever find yourself spending many years in one particular technology and in the position of looking for new work for the first time in a long while. Look to local event sponsors Look for community events that are happeni...
Back in January, I was tapped at Temporal to leave the comfy, familiar world of being an IC Head of Community to instead lead up a brand new function: Developer Advocacy & Community (DAC). Our team’s mandate is to get Temporal’s name “out there” in communities and on topics where we weren’t yet known.
I’ve led engineering teams before, community teams plenty of times, even notably cat herded an internationally distributed team of 100,000+ open source contributors powering ~2% of the Internet. And I have to say, after a year under my belt of doing this… all of that was absolute cake compared to leading a freaking Developer Advocacy team. 🤣 (Ok, ok, not actually compared to Drupal, but it’s up there. ;-))
Here is a “countdown” of five year-end reflections on how that all went, including some shout-outs to some of the team’s amazing work, peppered with a great deal of learnings, in case they help anyone else out there.
Turns out, if you ever manage a Developer Advocacy team, you end up inheriting the "superset" of ALL of the logistical problems you get when managing:
a software development company, AND
a television production studio, AND
a content publishing house, AND
a vocational training program, AND
a travel agency, AND
an events company
…ALL IN ONE. (I was NOT prepared. 😅) Especially in a hypergrowth startup within the context of a Marketing org that is itself going through hypergrowth. :O
Events were particularly killer for us earlier in the year when the team was still small. We came up with a GREAT plan in Q1 that looked super healthy and sustainable. No one was away from home longer than a week per month, we built in plenty of buffer to get content deliverables done ahead of time, etc. Then, between various offsites, ad-hoc customer trainings, cross-functional requested travel to local (for them) events, and DevRellian-initiated travel to conferences they cared about, this all blew up in a big, unfortunate way. :(
Another interesting thing about working for a company for whom “Reliable as Gravity” is one of our core company values is that Temporal itself wasn’t really set up for Developer Advocacy at the start of the year, either. An intense, rigorous cross-functional review process and tight, professional video editing is VERY welcome and necessary when pushing a new server release or a major product launch. But it is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of “A new AI framework came out on Monday; can we learn enough about it to be dangerous and get a demo and video about it out by Friday?”
A few changes we made in response to this:
Hire “Event-Oriented” Developer Advocates based in strategic locations where lots of events are happening. For us in 2025, that’s SF, NY, India, and UK (still hiring btw!). This turns a long run of disrupting your life, being stuck in airports, coming home with a pile of dirty laundry staring at you, and missing your family into hopping on the metro for the day or the evening and returning home to your cat. You are also then able to start building community in those places, because there’s continuity of the same faces showing up, and you’re able to form long-term relationships with event organizers, venues, and other partners.
Create a dedicated function for Enterprise DevRel. Having the same DAs fly around for conferences as fly around for customer trainings (which tend to be more needs-based than predictable in advance) is a surefire recipe for burnout. By splitting these, we ensure focus on both building brand awareness and helping new customers find success, as well as activities focused on expanding Temporal’s usage within existing customers.
Create clearly differentiated places for experimental vs. “official” resources.
Code: We created https://github.com/temporal-community as a new space where DevRel (and others!) can put our code samples and other projects that are not meant to be “Reliable as Gravity” (we put those under https://github.com/temporalio).
Resources: We also create explicit spaces like Code Exchange where community members and Temporalites alike can share example projects, helper applications, and other useful things to folks getting started, and it is very clearly separate and distinct from our “official” Documentation and Learning Resources.
Videos: Our YouTube channel now has a “Works on My Machine” category for videos that are essentially DAs running a demo from their IDE, to clearly differentiate them from more branded, polished, professioanlly edited videos such as Webinars, Customer Case Studies, and videos of talks from our Replay conference.
Create a central Global Events Calendar for ALL events and establish a regular communication cadence with Field Marketing. This gets us sharing our respective plans “early and often” so we can align on staffing and expectations, and there are WAY fewer surprises / duplicative efforts. We can also use this time to share insights with one another about what we’re hearing on both the Sales and Community side.
Some of the most successful things we did this year were in partnership with others: OSS projects that have built integration with Temporal, strategic partners and customers who brought us into their communities, and community members going out and sharing their knowledge with others. This is win/win/win because:
There are now at least two developer networks who see it, not just ours
There are also two Marketing orgs pushing on it, not just one
We are able to speak to developers in both geographical locations and human languages we otherwise could not have
Folks who don’t work for you automatically have more “social cred” when saying glowing things about the product.
It’s also just plain REWARDING to celebrate other people and promote the great work they’re doing with your stuff! :)
The one thing I’d like to change about this next year is being a bit more intentional and strategic vs. opportunistic and reactive to these sorts of partnerships. Collaborating with our Partners team, Product Marketing, Sales, Contellation members, and others to collate a list of “target” partners and then starting from there to figure out proactively who we might be able to partner with vs. what happened a lot this year of “I know so-and-so at X company” or “so-and-so from Y company reached out to us.”
In addition to building out a brand new team, AI emerged as a new focus for us (and I’m guessing maybe for other folks out there :P). So the team had to get ramped on AI, and we needed to do it fast. We took a blended approach:
First, events. Team members attended AI conferences, hackathons, and meetups to quickly gain an understanding of the space from industry experts, as well as gather AI pain points and use cases around from the AI community directly.
Next, hands-on experience. We held an AI Hackathon at our team offsite to get folks playing with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Sora first-hand, putting them into practical use to solve problems for themselves and the team, and learning of the tools’ various quirks as a result. We time-boxed this exercise in order to push folks to use these tools in more of a “vibe codey” way to build a better understanding of the new developers coming into the AI space (and even some of our Very Serious Enterprise Customers™ who were starting to dabble with AI coding agents earlier this year).
Next, content. For this, we actively sought out opportunities to partner cross-functionally, as well as externally. We led AI webinars for Marketing, created demos, blog posts, and videos to help Sales proactively combat objections and highlight Temporal’s strengths, and worked with strategic partners on content of interest to both of our respective communities. On the strategic partner side, we invited them to do live coding sessions, went on their livestreams, and invited them to ours to show off the innovative ways they use our product to our community.
And finally, full circle back to… events. But this time on stage teaching our learnings about AI to others, at AI Meetups, at AI conferences, at non-AI conferences, and at huge industry events such as AWS re:Invent.
At the same time the team was doing all of those amazing things (not to mention all the non-AI things), I was working hard to hire more amazing team members to help. However, the advent of AI has made the entire hiring process an absolute nightmare, on all sides:
There are AI-created job postings (some of which are fake).
There are AI-created resumes (some from fake candidates).
There are AI-powered Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that apply “intelligence” such as dumb keyword matching in order to decide whether or not to even flag you as someone to talk to based on your AI-generated resume to their AI-generated job description. :P
There are AI-powered recruiters and candidates spamming up Hiring Managers’ LinkedIn inboxes such that you get overpowered and miss real, actual messages from real, actual humans.
If you do manage to talk to a real, actual human and set them down the path of an interview loop, they’re likely to use vibe coding tools for homework assignments (because efficiency), but then completely biff it in the tech screen when they can’t even begin to describe a single thing about how “their” code works. :\
So hiring this year has by necessity been slower, more rigid and process-driven, and also far more relationship-based than I’m generally comfortable with. :\
If you find yourself in the job market in 2026, here are my biggest pieces of advice:
Get out to events in your space and talk to real humans. That shortcuts a whole bunch of this nonsense. (I swear, if things keep going this way, we are going to “AI” ourselves right back to age-old Boomer advice of “simply” walking around town holding your paper resume in hand while introducing yourself to businesses randomly. :P)
Set up authentic conversations with people who you enjoyed working with in the past (and vice versa) and ask for a referral. And by this I don’t mean go on LinkedIn, turn on your “#OpenToWork” badge, and put out a broadcast message to your network “Hey, I’m looking, does anyone know of anything?” (That is unfortunately all too common; LinkedIn is basically doomscrolling these days. :\) And I also don’t mean DMing that person to ask same question directly. I mean ask them how they’re doing (and mean it). Ask them if they’d be up for a catch-up in “real time.” Find out more about what they’re doing these days, how they like it, what they feel about their company and team, etc. Then share details about what you’re looking for, what you’ve been working on lately, what gets you excited. THEN ask for a referral, so if they can help you, they can do so with context.
Keep “learning in public” throughout your job search (as much as you can). Build things, play around with new tools, blog and/or record videos about it, talk about it at a local meetup and/or on social media. This keeps your skills fresh, demonstrates ongoing expertise outside of your employment context, and connects you with others interested in your topic(s) of choice.
Over the course of the past year, we have forged an AMAZING group of smart, kind, creative, and *hilarious* people who love lifting others up and sharing openly about what they learn. They lend support when folks are going through tough times, they help each other out where they see a need, and they rejoice in celebrating their team mates’ wins. That isn’t by accident. Not only does team culture need to be set up with intentionality, it’s real, actual work to both craft and maintain it (especially as you scale), and it’s something everyone on the team takes ownership in. Temporal, distributed systems, AI… all that stuff can be taught. Humility, empathy, mentorship, proactivity, collaborating well with others… much less so. We screen for these traits during hiring, we create operational supports to encourage their use, and we go out of our way to celebrate when we see others exhibiting them. This is something I want to take great care about as we’re set to expand the team in 2026 and beyond.
I also learned that one cannot “simply” stand up strong team foundations and work hard to be a conscientious, caring leader and expect everything will work itself out. The reality is everyone in DevRel has some form of employment-related PTSD from previous experience and this takes more intention and care than you might’ve otherwise had to do in your teams in the past around over-communicating about your intentions and goals, being explicit in your expectations, empowering your team to set strong priorities so they feel more empowered to say “yes” to the right things, and being understanding and patient with them if they make some initial faulty assumptions about you based on toxic leadership they’ve experienced the past. <3
2025 was our “bootstrappy” year: a lot of foundational work, a lot of new faces, a lot of standing things up operationally. It was also some of the most brain-taxing work I’ve done in my career thusfar, but it’s also been extremely rewarding. 💖
A few thoughts on things we can improve upon for next year:
Better balance “top-down” strategy with “bottoms-up” ideas. In areas such as events and content partnerships, while still keeping low-effort channels (such as livestreams, meetup in a box) for accommodating exciting ad-hoc things that inevitably come up.
Move from experiments to scalable, repeatable programs. This year we did a lot of experimentation to help us build some experience on what works, what doesn’t, and what we might want to try again with a few tweaks. Next year, we’ll be trying to take what’s been working and form it into something we can “copy/pasta” many times. An example is what we’re trying to build out for our regional developer event strategy, inclusive of first-party meetups, third-party meetups, workshops, and conferences that we can then use to enable our locally-focused DAs around the globe.
Align our 2026 events calendar as much as possible to strategic regions where we already have DevRel boots on the ground so people are able to spend more time writing code and producing great content, but MORE importantly spending time with their FAMILIES AND PETS! 😻
Better formalize our team's relationship with Product & Engineering and Dev Success so we have more frequent "two-way" conversations, sharing insights with one another of we're hearing in our respective areas (from in-person events, community members, etc.). [We focused more on meeting Sales and Marketing’s needs this year, as a starting point.]
When we create demos, focus more on “real-world” use cases and problems developers in those spaces actually have, fewer “Hello World” esque examples. For this year, we had to start somewhere, but going forward we’ll get more mileage out of demos we can easily re-use event to event and/or easily adjust to incorporate new tech as the landscape shifts.
Measuring the impact of our activities. This year, we started with “output” metrics (# of videos, # of code demos, # of events, etc.) because we needed to start somewhere. And especially in our “bootstrappy” year, it made sense to focus on upskilling and building out the team, meeting the shifting business and ecosystem needs, and standing up internal processes and collaboration paths for Getting *(@ Done. However, in the new year, I want to tighten this up quite a bit, and help us to measure the “downstream” impact of our work. A lot of DevRel impact is infamously NOT trackable, and our team is in a particularly difficult spot because a lot of our activities happen on other peoples’ properties (their YouTube channels, their meetups, etc.), but we can start by measuring and reporting on what can be measured, knowing we won’t be able to measure everything.
And, as always, the plan is to continue “learning in public” as I go, so watch this space for more “lessons learned the hard way” in building out DevRel teams. :D Hope you all have a fantastic rest of your 2025 and see you in the new year! 🎉
