What's the difference between Developer Relations and Developer Marketing? How do you work together?

DevRel and Dev Marketers are 2 sides of the same coin. Developer relations (or tech evangelists) are responsible for the truly technical content with the ultimate goal of building a developer community to market the product. Developer marketers partner with DevRel to distribute their content and drive funnel marketing goals. Examples: DevRel: is go to for message testing and technical BS-ometer Distill technical differentiation into positioning statements, messaging, and value propositions that ...Read More

I tend to look at DevRel as a pretty unique role that's part CSM, part Marketing and part Pre-Sales. Developer Marketing is full-stack marketing around a technical product. To sum it up quickly, DevRel tends to have a great pulse on the developer community and how your current developer audience will feel about your launches or features. Dev Marketing tends to have a pulse on positioning, bill of materials, product management alignment, etc. So I tend to look for Dev Marketing to influence roadm ...Read More

Great question. We actually have a third unit – Developer Experience. I'm sure it differs at other organizations, but at dbt Labs... Developer Relations is focused on growing the community (measured by Slack members and weekly active projects in the open source product), building lasting relationships with members, enforcing community guidelines, elevating diverse and marginalized voices, and highlighting the contributing work of members around the world. They build trust. Developer Experience i ...Read More

I think it's important to discuss the objective of investing in marketing to developers before answering this question directly. At Twilio, the Developer Marketing team described their mission as 'inspiring and equipping today's developers to build the next generation of communications'. Their goal was to make Twilio APIs an integral part of the toolkit of any developers, regardless of whether they had an immediate need from them or not. The thesis (which prove to be spectacularly correct) was t ...Read More

I'd say Developer Marketing + Developer Relations = Developer GTM. You'll want to pair these two functions as much as possible, and the way I've always thought about it is that Dev Marketing structures and provides the overall air cover (awareness, channel and content strategy, program management, measurement) and Dev Rel parachutes in for the high-touch stuff: enablement, evangelization, content production.  Dev Rel are the true subject matter experts, the most authentic voices behind your prod ...Read More