A Comprehensive DevRel Metrics Guide (Part 4): Company Stages and Reporting
17 September 2023
Table of Contents
Imagine you are working at an early stage startup and you are tasked with tracking meaningful metrics. And then imagine you are working at an enterprise company with the same task.
Would you track the same metrics?
I have been scratching my head over this question because it does not make sense to me that the metrics should be the same for both companies 🤔.
What Company Stages Are There?
I found an inspiring talk from Vera Tiago that resonated with me. There is also a written form of it, if that is more your thing 🥰.
In there she talks about North Star metrics and then comes to the topic of DevRel-Focus areas. Her Developer Relations focus areas are:
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Awareness
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Adoption
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Education
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Retention
And then she makes an interesting distinction between two areas you have to look at as a company:
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Maturity of your product
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Maturity of your community
So if you are an early stage startup you probably have an unmature product and a just forming community. Thus working towards retention may not be your highest priority as your product has to many kinks and your community is too small.
It should be better to work towards acquisition and adoption to get more users.
By doing this you get more feedback and exposure to achieve product market fit.
Figure 1. Vera Tiagos four pillars of DevRel and company stage (Source (a written form of it))
Evaluating and validating your company’s stage and your focus with management is extremely important as it again will determine the metrics you are prioritizing.
How to Do Reporting?
Many companies have a monthly All-Hands meeting. Some call it a Jour-Fix. Whatever you call it, entering your collected data into a nice presentation template gives you the possibility to always be ready to give a presentation.
I do not get into all the details in the presentation deck but focus on the things that matter now. Even when I track more than that as outlined in the previous blog post. There is a dedicated slide at the end where I link to the raw metrics if anyone is interested in them.
With the slide deck I am good to go to present 5-10 Minutes and give a concise update about how we are doing 🎉
Here is my template as a Google-Slide Deck.
Conclusion
And this marks the end of this series. We discussed why metrics are important, where to even start and my personal view on what metrics to track.
In this blog post I gave an introduction on what might be important and expected from DevRel at different company stages.
As always: Do not blindly follow advice but take it as a food for thought and an idea to test in your circumstance! I feel this is especially important in DevRel as no company is the same 🙃.
Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash.