Building a Developer Advocacy Team from Scratch #3: #DevRelTeamOps

Our team has been growing steadily throughout the year, and while most of the team foundations we first set up have remained in place, as we’ve scaled we’ve also had to get a bit more mature with our operations and reporting. Who knew that running a Developer Advocacy Team is like running a travel agency, a content publishing house, a television recording studio, and an engineering consultancy all in one? 😅

Here’s an operational framework that should work for just about any team of a certain size, and how we implemented it for Temporal’s Developer Relations team.

Meetings

Ahhh, meetings. This is always a tricky subject in any team. Engineers need lots of deep focus time, and meetings (especially in the middle of the work day) can utterly destroy this. At the same time, meetings are also the primary way (especially in a remote company) that you forge strong interpersonal relationships and stay aligned, both within the team and cross-functionally.

After a few iterations, here’s where we seem to have landed with this as far as Minimum Viable Meetings™ go:

Here’s a breakdown:

• Focus: To support deep focus time, we created “NO MEETING WEDNESDAYS” (and also try to avoid meetings on Thursdays). Team members are encouraged to stick a day-long “out of office” calendar block on their calendar, which will automatically decline any meetings that are added there.

• Sprints: Our team works in two-week sprints, aligned with Product and Engineering. Each team within DevRel has a weekly Sub-Team Sync where they field incoming requests and discuss other topics of relevance. We do DevRel Sprint Planning every other week as a full DevRel team (with a DevRel Mid-Sprint Check-In on the alternating week) and finish each sprint by showcasing our work at Company-Wide Sprint Demos. Once a month, we also hold a DevRel Retro and do an anonymized Start / Stop / Continue exercise to drill in on what’s working and not, ending the meeting by assigning out actionable next steps to improve things for next time.

• Reporting: Each week, there’s a Marketing-Wide Update meeting, where each functional team provides a status update for their area, raises any blockers, and shares out recent learnings. Once a month, we wrap DevRel’s accomplishments into a newsletter-style update that’s distributed to the whole company, and for that we do a monthly DevRel Update Co-Working session where we all bash on this together at the same time (it might sound dull, but this meeting actually doubles as a lovely place to regularly celebrate each others’ wins! 🤩).

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: DevRel sits at the centre of ALL teams within a company, so it’s absolutely critical that we ensure we have tight alignment and are partnering closely with them. We have bi-weekly (alternating) Content Team / Video Team Office Hours sessions where we can get proper Marketing visibility and support for the content that we’re creating, as well as find out what new needs are on the horizon. We also do a monthly sync with Product + Engineering as well as Sales + Demand Gen (Field Marketing). This ensures there’s awareness and alignment of our efforts around things like product launch support, meetups, strategic event support, and customer training.

• Social Connection: It can’t be all work, all the time, especially with a team as filled with fun and interesting people as ours! :D We alternate every other Friday between DevRel Code & Tell (where folks sign up for a slot to share whatever it is they’re working on, and/or we invite speakers from across the org to do the same, and it’s a fantastic way to come up to speed on a bunch of interesting tech-y things we wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to learn), and DevRel Social Chat where the only rule is you can’t talk about work (which means we’ve spent the time on a wide range of things, like learning how to make balloon animals, comparing retro gaming collections, and playing online board games :D). For the rest of the week, there’s the #devrel-team-fun channel where we share memes, interesting reads, pictures of our pets, vacation pics, whatever we’re eating that day, etc.

  

Reporting, Planning, and Doing Work

Here comes an eye-chart. Brace yourself! ;-)

This once again appears to be the Minimum Viable Operations™ we’ve found for our team. Let’s go track by track:

Reporting

• Micro-Updates: The team is heavily encouraged to post status updates, pics from events, links to newly created content, etc. to #topic-devrel, which is our team channel that’s open to the whole company. This way we get to “drip” important things we’re working on (which helps to somewhat counter-balance the “drip” of incoming requests :D) and we help raise broader awareness of just what the heck it is our team does all day.

• Organizational Updates: It’s important that the people in your reporting chain are aware and up to speed on what you’re doing (and when they can expect things), as well as others in your org to be aware of places for interlock / collaboration. In our company, this is done through the weekly Marketing Update meeting, as well as selective cross-posts from our channel into #topic-marketing (and/or #topic-sales, #topic-product, etc.)

• Asset Library: When our team “ships” something (e.g. blog post, code example, video, event, slide deck, workshop…) it gets logged in a central Marketing Calendar project which is syndicated to the company wiki and a calendar for org-wide visibility.

• Newsletter: Finally, it’s a good idea once a month to put out some more formal comms around your work that wraps those micro-updates and “ships” with some narrative about why we did those things and the impact that they had. We publish a Monthly DevRel Update to the whole company that covers our metrics, notable wins, and a preview of what’s coming up next.

Planning

• Inbox: “Unknown unknown” requests are a fact of life for a DevRel team, and you need a way to manage this. From a user experience point of view, ideally this is a single place (e.g. a form) to direct people to ask for things, with some fields they must populate to give you what you need to know in order to understand the request and what to do with it, as well as some logic that routes the request to whichever is the right team / person to triage and prioritize it. (This is something that’s still in progress for us; in the meantime we have a standing agenda item to triage incoming requests on our weekly sub-team meetings.)

• Backlog: Some of those requests you’ll need to do now, but many of them can wait until later. Your backlog acts as a “parking lot” of good ideas, but ones that don’t necessarily need to happen now. For this one, we collaborated together with Marketing’s Content team to create a Centralized Content Backlog project for both of us, as that helps us align our respective content priorities, and also opens up things in the list to be done by not just DevRel folk, but others who work with the Content team, such as Product Marketing, Solution Architects, or Engineers.

• Strategic Roadmap: One reason a DevRel team can get a lot of incoming requests is if other people in the org don’t know what you’re doing or don’t understand what your priorities are and why or don’t know when they can expect a thing they are waiting for. The Strategic Roadmap is your ability to provide up-front answers to all of these questions, not just for stakeholders but for your team as well. It’s also super handy to use if you get an incoming request from out in left field, because it allows you to turn a “no” (which can be uncomfortable) to a discussion around tradeoffs, e.g. “which of these things would you recommend we push off in order to take on that request?” to which the answer is often, “um, actually, none of those things. never mind.” :D

  

  For this one, we set up a project called DevRel “Game Changers” (so named in an attempt to mentally shift folks away from “task / ticket” mentality). It contains a limited number of BIG, high-impact things across a number of “evergreen” themes (e.g. AI, Accelerated Onboarding, Community Engagement, Operational Efficiency, …) and NOT functional sub-teams, which helps encourage collaboration across sub-teams (we also “double up” on Game Changers so there’s a point person and at least one partner). We update the things in this project weekly, and treat the tasks as “Epics,” adding stakeholders who need to be in the loop as “Collaborators” so they get an email whenever we leave comments about major happenings.

• Team Capacity: And finally, a unique challenge of running a Dev Advocacy team is that people can be on planes a whole bunch. That means in order to actually understand what you can reasonably take on in a given sprint, whether your team can staff that event, etc. you need visibility into who is where on what days. For our team, we set up a calendar called DevRel Faces in Places for this purpose, where people cross-post the events they’re going to as well as when they’re out on PTO.

Doing

• “Go-To” Area Boards: Your Strategic Roadmap tracks the Epics, but you still need a place to track nitty-gritty Tasks needed to get these things done. Each of the “Go-To” DevRellers manages their own projects for their own areas, cross-posting tasks to the DevRel Game Changers and/or DevRel Faces in Places projects, as appropriate. They can set these boards up however they want: kanban-style (e.g. todo, doing, done), by category (e.g. workshop, training, maintenance) ... whatever works best for them!

• “Crew” Slack Channels: Often these “Go-To” areas involve collaboration with a bunch of folks from other sub-teams. or those from outside the teams altogether. For this, we spin up #crew-X Slack channels for the working group around a given area, where they can have detailed discussions without adding too much noise to the main channels.

• Office Hours / Co-Working Meetings: These are great meetings for collaboration, getting feedback, unblocking each other, or body doubling to get the actual work banged out.

Other #DevRelTeamOps examples?

What are some things you do on your teams that help lead to higher visibility, improved collaboration, improved team cohesion, and (most importantly) more fun? :D