How DevRel teams can turn developer motions into revenue

[00:00.51] - Peggy:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where DevRel comes in, right? DevRel is the one nurturing and generating all of that activity in the community. I think it depends on the business. Obviously, usage is the highest quality developer intent signal you can look at, but that's actually really hard to set up today. If you were to do it by hand, I think there's tooling now that can help with that, but wiring up all the telemetry and getting those anonymous package installs and actually connecting that to a user can be difficult. But if you can wire it up, you'll start to see patterns. Are there certain CLI commands or maybe installing a Helm Chart or a Terraform provider? Those would indicate that your tool is being used in a production environment or potentially in a POC. Another big one for us at Apollo was activity on our learning platform. You would see multiple developers at the same company taking our course at the same time, and that indicated that they were maybe gearing up for replatforming and evaluating GraphQL. You would start to see the same signals.

[01:23.11] - Peggy:

I think it also depends on your customer journey and understanding your product. When we saw developers starting to talk about GraphQL Federation, that was a signal that indicated enterprise readiness. So it really depends on your business and your customer journey. And I think that's where DevRel can be really helpful—helping marketing and sales understand what are those trigger points or signals that indicate that maybe there's a POC or evaluation going on.

[02:00.68] - Achintya:

Welcome back to another episode of the Modern Dev GTM Brew. I'm Achintya, your podcast host. Today, we are exploring another hot topic, which is how DevRel teams can turn developer motions into revenue. To share insights on this topic, we have Peggy Rayzis, a developer marketing leader and community builder. Peggy built the developer growth engine at Apollo GraphQL, helping grow the company from a small open-source project to a successful enterprise business, handling over 5 trillion customer requests. She's currently the founder of Scale.Dev, advising startups on how to scale their open-source and PLG strategies into robust enterprise operations. Peggy, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here.

[03:08.03] - Peggy:

Thank you so much for having me. I am really excited to be talking about this with you today because I feel like there's just so much to get into with how to build a modern developer go-to-market motion. So I’m very much looking forward to this conversation.

[03:25.54] - Achintya:

Yeah, I agree. And Peggy, I have so many questions to ask you. I'll start with DevRel as a space and specifically dive straight into what values you think DevRel brings to the table and why it’s important for businesses to invest in a strong DevRel function.

[03:45.56] - Peggy:

Yeah. So DevRel means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But the way that I like to think about it is it's really the bridge between developers and your organization. A lot of times, when we think of developer relations, we think of the very public, visible things, right? Like speaking at a conference or doing YouTube videos, workshops, etc. But I think actually good DevRel in 2024 is all about championing developers internally within your organization too. Oftentimes, these developer advocates have the pulse on what developers are doing, how they’re learning, what tools they’re using. It’s about championing developers internally and bringing all of that great feedback, learning, and signals back to product, sales, and marketing teams.

[04:39.77] - Achintya:

Got it. You’ve been in this space for a long time, but have you seen this function evolving? You mentioned what DevRel means in 2024—has it been different things in the past?

[04:56.05] - Peggy:

Yeah, I think DevRel is reinventing itself almost every three to four years. Before I was in DevRel, I was an engineer, and then I gradually found my way into DevRel organically towards the mid to late 2010s. Back then, VC money was cheap, companies were growing like crazy, and you had a really strong in-person event and meet-up scene. I feel like we were going to conferences in faraway places like Australia all the time. It was pretty crazy. So you saw these DevRel teams trying to be everywhere at once, meeting developers wherever they were, producing a lot of content, going to a lot of conferences. It was very hard, I remember, at the time, to actually measure the impact of that. Tooling wasn’t great; we were cobbling together a bunch of Google spreadsheets or weren’t measuring things at all. And it was really hard to quantify the impact of that. But in a way, it was working. You saw a lot of companies from that era, like Twilio, for example, with super strong, super successful DevRel programs that propelled their growth. So it wasn’t that it wasn’t working—it was. It was just hard for us to pinpoint exactly why.

Then the pandemic happened, and the world shut down, and we couldn’t go to these conferences anymore. Everyone shifted their strategy to more of an online approach. At the time, we were trying a lot of new things. One of the big successes my team put on was GraphQL Summit, our annual developer conference. We moved that online, we engaged more on platforms like Discord, we spun up our YouTube strategy, and online learning became really big as well because we couldn’t go to customers and deliver workshops in person. So everything shifted online. That was around the time, too, that the tooling improved, and you started to see more community CRMs popping up to take all the massive amounts of signal and make that actionable. So online learning was working pretty well, right? Then the world opened back up. Capital became more expensive, and a lot of layoffs happened. DevRel, I think, was hit really hard, especially in the past couple of years. We went through this correction. Now, I would say today, it’s about how can we be more targeted? How can DevRel contribute to the business? Maybe we didn’t need to go to a million conferences and dump a bunch of money into programs that weren’t working. Now we have tooling that’s really great, which can tell us what’s working, what’s not working, and where those signals are coming from. I think that’s really what the next phase of DevRel is about—how can DevRel be an effective champion for developers, both outside and inside the business? I think that’s a really exciting development for how DevRel can concretely contribute to the business.

[08:20.65] - Achintya:

Yeah, I agree. And talking about contributing to the business and the various GTM motions, DevTool companies have various GTM motions, and probably they’re not all logically connected, but you see developer-focused PLG motions, open source, some of them are not, and proper enterprise motions. Then there are DevRel teams that have to make sense of that and activate the developer professionals. Peggy, talking about developer motion, there are different developer GTM motions out there. There is PLG, there is open source, some of them are not, and there are enterprises. But what roles can DevRel professionals play in each of these motions?

[09:03.11] - Peggy:

Yeah, absolutely. I think DevRel can be really effective looking at what I like to call the modern hybrid funnel. So it’s not pure PLG or open source, and it’s not pure sales-led enterprise either—it’s mixing the best of both worlds. What does this look like? This is what we set up at Apollo, and we were very successful with it. Companies can use PLG and open source as a way to attract those enterprise end users towards their product. Then sales and marketing will use those developer intent signals, whether that’s interactions on GitHub or online communities, learning platforms, or all the different channels that are out there. You start to use those and group them into accounts, and then sales and marketing can use that information to prospect into the company, find the buyer, and sell to them. I think this motion is really effective for developer-first companies because you can’t really do two motions well. Selling to SMB is very different from selling to enterprise, and the conventional guidance is not to do both. PLG, open source, and enterprise are so different. But if you combine the best of both worlds and use open as a way to attract enterprise end users and direct your community strategies through that, it can be really powerful. I think every developer tools company in 2024 needs an enterprise strategy, and using open source and PLG as an acquisition engine can be a really effective way to kickstart that enterprise motion.

It’s also in the best interests of the users, right? They can kick the tires with it, create a POC, and demonstrate that value to their organization, which will set the stage for the sale much better.

[10:54.14] - Peggy:

And it's also in the best interests of the users, right? They can kick the tires with it, create a POC, and demonstrate that value to their org, which will set the stage for the sale that much better.

[11:09.14] - Achintya:

Peggy, to be honest, that’s a very interesting thought. But you spoke about these intent signals and how you can qualify someone to be sales-ready, or they might be at the top of the funnel. What key intent signals should a DevRel professional identify? Can you talk more about that?

[11:34.13] - Peggy:

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is where DevRel comes in because DevRel is the one nurturing and generating all of that activity in the community. I think it depends on the business. Obviously, usage is the highest quality developer intent signal you can look at. But that’s actually really hard to set up today. If you were to do it by hand, I think there’s tooling now that can help you set that up, but wiring up all the telemetry and getting those anonymous package installs and actually connecting that to a user can be difficult. But if you can wire it up, you’ll start to see patterns. Are there certain CLI commands or maybe installing a Helm chart or a Terraform provider? Those would indicate your tool is being used in a production environment or potentially a POC. Another big one for us at Apollo was activity on our learning platform. You would see multiple developers at the same company taking our course at the same time, and that indicated that they were maybe gearing up for replatforming and evaluating GraphQL. You would start to see the same signals. I think it also depends on your customer journey as well and understanding your product.

[13:06.10] - Peggy:

When we saw developers starting to talk about GraphQL Federation, that was a signal that indicated enterprise readiness. So it really depends on your business and your customer journey. And I think that’s where DevRel can be really helpful—helping marketing and sales understand what are those trigger points or signals that indicate that maybe there’s a POC or evaluation going on.

[13:35.29] - Achintya:

That’s very interesting, Peggy. I think a couple of things that you mentioned. One is looking at signals, and then you mentioned signals like multiple developers from the same organization being active and doing various activities on your repo, on your product, etc. There’s also another thought process where organizations see that they have a lot of stars, say, or individual signals on their GitHub repositories from individual developers. While you are speaking about looking at probably the entire picture at an account level, I just wanted to understand the differences between both signals. Should I look at things at an account level versus, "Yes, I have so many GitHub stars with so many developers, probably across a lot of accounts," and how should I look at that?

[14:33.92] - Peggy:

Yeah, I think it’s tricky. I would say grouping things at the account level is really smart because one GitHub star might not mean a lot, and an installation might not either. But if you see maybe five developers on the same team starring the repo, that could mean something different. So that’s why it’s really important to group all these signals at the account level. Then you start to draw patterns. You start to see these little spikes in activity where multiple developers are taking courses on federation or asking questions in the community. I think just grouping at the account level is honestly one of the most helpful ways to look at it, and it gives you this single pane of glass into everything that’s happening in that account. Often, there’s this dark funnel activity. They don’t actually reach out to sales until they’re very far along in the evaluation process. That’s really where DevRel can come in—uncover some of that dark funnel activity that’s happening at the beginning of the sales cycle and then surface that to sales and marketing so sales can take a more consultative approach in helping them through that evaluation. I think that can be really, really powerful if you do it right.

[15:49.98] - Achintya:

I agree. There’s a lot of chatter about linking DevRel activities and functions to revenue generation and how the DevRel function can act as a catalyst to revenue generation, especially if your company is an open source or a developer-focused PLG offering. But what programs should a DevRel team implement to facilitate this transition of developers to enterprise trials? What can they do here?

[16:19.72] - Peggy:

Yeah. I would say in my experience, DevRel can be really helpful at the beginning and then at the end of the funnel. Some of those programs that help in the beginning are all about making sure they can get help, facilitate a really smooth technical POC or evaluation. So nurturing in online communities can be really powerful. I think for early-stage startups, creating a private one-on-one Slack channel with those early customers or design partners can be great. Obviously, that’s not going to scale as you get beyond a certain size, but then you can draw upon thousands of developers and start connecting maybe different customers in the same vertical. If you have a lot of customers in e-commerce or health care, actually being able to introduce them and say, "Hey, you two are working on the same problem. Learn how this person solved it." People love that, right? At the end of the day, we’re all just looking to connect and learn from each other. When you can introduce somebody who’s struggling with one problem to somebody who’s solved that before, they will remember you forever, and it builds so much trust. So I think that can be a really great way to connect folks early in the funnel.

[17:38.32] - Peggy:

I think also making sure your educational materials and docs are on point and complete will facilitate a really smooth evaluation, even helping them with the RFP process. If there are different docs or slideshows you can give them to make sure that goes successfully, those are some ways that DevRel can be really helpful early on. I would say at the end, in-person workshops, events, and lunch-and-learns can be really helpful for closing deals. One example is GraphQL Summit, our annual user conference. My team led that for seven years, and it was hugely impactful for connecting with our enterprise customers in person and really accelerated deals. We found that customers who attended GraphQL Summit had a much higher ACV than customers who didn’t. We also got qualitative feedback from sales that it was super impactful for them to have that face time with customers. We had exec meeting programs, VIP programs, and rolled out the red carpet for them. So I would say those are some ways DevRel can be super impactful at the beginning and the end of the sales cycle. And then obviously, expansion, right? You need those teams to keep getting value throughout the life of the deal and to be able to expand to the next 100 or 1,000 developers. What does that look like? That’s where online learning becomes really impactful. We used to collaborate with sales to see how many customers we could get to take the training and give them swag if they did. Partnering on those programs can be a really great way to facilitate expansion.

[19:28.96] - Achintya:

Right. That’s great, Peggy, because I was coming to your experience at Apollo GraphQL of building the entire DevRel function. Are there certain aspects—I know you’ve covered many of them—but are there certain aspects that we can double-click on to understand what were your key takeaways from your experience of building and leading the DevRel function and growing the community?

[19:54.78] - Peggy:

Yeah, I would say there are a bunch of takeaways and learnings along the way—like 10 years of successes and mistakes. But I think when I look back and think of maybe some things I wish I could have told myself at the beginning, the earlier you can connect your DevRel programs back to the business, the better off you’ll be. To be fair, the tooling did not really exist when I was building the team. It was hand-spun Google spreadsheets, but that’s not the case anymore. There’s a lot of really great tooling that makes that easy. So I would say definitely look into that and figure out how you can measure the ROI of everything that you’re doing. On a similar note, good DevRel is not just about these big flashy conferences and external programs. A lot of the value can actually be in taking the learnings from your community and then bringing that back to products so they can improve the product. It’s about helping marketing understand what resonates with these developers, what pain points they’re experiencing, so they can tailor their campaigns to them. It’s collaborating with sales and helping them understand what signals to look for in an account that indicate they’re ready to talk to you, or collaborating with them on consultative outreach programs.

[21:19.12] - Peggy:

So I would say good DevRel is not just about external DevRel. It’s also about internal—how can you champion developers both inside and outside of your company? And then the other thing I would say too is just to generally give more value to your community than you take. Trust takes a really long time to build up with developers, and it can be lost in an instant. So you always want to err on the side of giving back, right? That’s why we built our learning platform, and we have dozens of hundreds of hours of ungated learning content for them. That makes such a difference. We hear all the time from customers and people in the community how much of an impact that made. So you always want to leave folks with a positive impression and just give back to your community and figure out how you can elevate them, empower them, lift them up, and connect them together. Those would be the three biggest takeaways or lessons learned.

[22:24.90] - Achintya:

Since we touched on that, there is a crucial role of DevRel in developer education. What are some of the best practices for building effective technical content that you’ve seen?

[22:40.10] - Peggy:

We built our learning platform in-house, and I might not recommend anybody just starting out to do that, right? But I think there are some general-purpose lessons that would be helpful. One of the things that worked out really well is that everything in the learning platform is connected to your Apollo login, so everything is tracked. We have it integrated into the product too. You can see people’s badges, and admins can see how many people at their company have taken the courses, which is really helpful. But I would say focus on getting to that magic moment and that value with your product as early as you possibly can. It should be hands-on because developers love to build. I wouldn’t spend an hour going through theoretical concepts up front. You want to get them to that “Hello World,” that first piece of value that’s going to make the light bulb go off in their head. For us, it was running your first GraphQL query, so we made that super early in the journey. I would say for enterprise learning programs, definitely focus on languages and frameworks that enterprise developers care about, like Java and .NET. Our learning platform used to be just JavaScript and TypeScript, but based on customer feedback, we had a lot of folks using Java and .NET, so we built courses around that too. So really understand your audience and what languages and frameworks they’re using.

The other thing I would say too is definitely get user feedback and just iterate and improve. Video is really expensive to produce and difficult to change. So before you film that, you want to make sure you get it right. We would release our courses in beta, just the written format, and then user test those over and over and get feedback from customers before recording the video. So I would say definitely user test as much as you can and iterate based on feedback.

[24:47.83] - Achintya:

Got it. Maybe just double-clicking on the developer education part, how did your team structure look like? What team structures do you recommend? Because generally, marketers are not so good at writing technical content. Was there a collaboration with the product teams, and how did that work out so that the technical content could be fairly high quality?

[25:08.10] - Peggy:

Yeah. So the first role that I hired for when I started the team was a technical writer, and I would probably recommend that to almost everyone, right? Fancy DevRel programs are great, but if your docs are not in order, no one’s going to be able to use your tool. So I would say start there. Make sure that is good before you branch out into these other things. We started with a technical writer, then branched out into DevRel, then branched out into developer education. We had an in-house video editor on the team as well, which helped us move fast with our educational courses. We also had engineers on the team to actually build out the sites and help us do some of that integration work, which was super impactful. I think there’s no one-size-fits-all, right? It depends on your programs. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and what stage you’re at. But you can never go wrong with hiring a really great technical writer.

[26:17.14] - Achintya:

Got it. The last question I ask everyone on this podcast is, what are some of the best books, resources, podcasts, or blogs that you recommend for DevRel teams?

[26:29.71] - Peggy:

Yeah. So I think anything by Mary Thengvall, The Business Value of DevRel, is a really good one. Understanding DevRel qualified leads, you can’t go wrong with that. I’m in a lot of private go-to-market DevRel communities that I think are super helpful. My friend just started a podcast, Emma Porcello. She’s the gold standard for developer education. Her podcast is called The Last Tech Podcast. She has a number of DevRel—

[26:57.11] - Achintya:

We can link that up here too.

[26:59.99] - Peggy:

Yeah, I’ll send you the link. She has a lot of DevRel heavy hitters appearing on her podcast. I would recommend that. The other thing I’d recommend too, I think sometimes us DevRel folks like to be in our bubble a little bit. One of the most helpful things you can do to learn how to be an effective DevRel inside your company is to learn about what other functions are doing. So I like to follow growth and go-to-market leaders to level up my understanding of sales and marketing. I think understanding what they do has made me a more effective DevRel and marketing leader. So I’d recommend that too.

[27:37.63] - Achintya:

Yeah. Thanks, Peggy. This is amazing. I learned so much in this discussion. Great to have you. Thanks once again.

[27:44.48] - Peggy:

Thank you for having me. This was super fun.