Developer Relations

Some companies don’t sell their products to ordinary customers, but to people who build software. These people are called developers. In their everyday work, they decide which outside technology to build into their own programs. Developer Relations is the part of a company that looks after exactly this group. This includes guides, sample code, talks, forums, and personal contact. The abbreviation for this is DevRel.

Why developers decide on technology

With many technical products, it’s not the boss who buys, but the team that effectively decides. A developer tries out three providers in one afternoon. The provider with whom he has a working result after twenty minutes wins. Classic advertising barely reaches this group, because they prefer to check things out for themselves.

This is especially clear with AI companies. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Mistral offer their models via an interface. An interface, in English API, is a fixed connection point through which an external program sends a request and receives a response back. Anyone building an app with an AI feature chooses one of these providers. This choice is usually made by the development team.

That’s why DevRel is economically important. A single convinced developer can lead their company to spend millions. Conversely: someone who gives up frustrated after an hour often never comes back. Poor documentation therefore costs a provider real money.

What a DevRel team spends its day on

A large part of the work is documentation. This refers to the written description of how to use a product. Added to this are quickstart guides and ready-made sample projects available for download. Such examples are often more effective than any text, because you can try them out immediately.

The second part is public relations within the technical community. DevRel people give talks at conferences, publish videos, and write technical blog posts. They answer questions on platforms like GitHub, Discord, or Stack Overflow. The tone there is sober and matter-of-fact, because promotional language is quickly penalized in these forums.

The third part runs in the other direction. DevRel collects complaints and wishes from the community and carries them into the company itself. When a hundred people don’t understand the same error message, that’s a task for the product team. A common misconception is that DevRel is simply marketing with technical jargon. In fact, the people there are usually able to code themselves, and part of their job is criticizing their own product.

Where DevRel becomes visible

You constantly encounter the results of this work without knowing the term. Every homepage titled “Quickstart” with ten lines of sample code comes from a DevRel team. The cookbooks of AI providers also belong here, meaning collections of ready-made recipes for typical tasks. When a new model version is released, a tutorial is often ready the very same day.

Job postings feature titles like Developer Advocate or Developer Evangelist. Both essentially mean the same task. The older term Evangelist is used less often today because it sounds too missionary. In business news, however, you read about numbers: how many developers use a platform and how fast that number is growing.

It’s important to distinguish this from support. Support solves a specific problem for a paying customer, usually in a closed ticket system. DevRel works publicly and preventively, so that the problem doesn’t arise in the first place. Both areas overlap but pursue different goals.