Essay · 18 min read

Measuring Developer Relations

swyx · swyx.io Free Advanced

The most honest piece written on devrel accountability, by someone who did the job. It splits devrel into community, content and product archetypes with different metrics each, lands on monthly active developers as the north star, and calls reach-chasing what it is: very expensive affiliate marketing.

• Proposes monthly active developers as the north star, while conceding it is lagging and multi-causal, so it needs leading indicators.
• Rejects GitHub stars, UTM-attributed traffic and badge scans as quantity metrics, and calls NPS easily gamed.
• Use the Sean Ellis question instead: how would you feel if you could no longer use this.
• Argues email subscribers are worth 100 to 1000 times a social follower, so treat content DevRel as a media company inside the company.