dominick.caponi | June 7th, 2021
DevRel - Why is it Important?
The notion of Developer Relations or DevRel has been around for around 20 years and has skyrocketed in popularity in the late 2010s. DevRel is increasingly becoming a key part of many companies’ business strategies, including big names like Microsoft and Amazon. As software eats the world, it will be paramount for any tech company to have a DevRel group.
As we move into the 21st century, tech literacy becomes more ubiquitous and as such, customers are opting more for easy-to-use APIs and frameworks that let them build their own solutions leveraging your specialized and battle-hardened tech. In addition to serving front-of-house customers, you can now tap into a larger addressable market by renting out your platform for other companies to use in their applications. For example, in addition to serving our front-of-house customers who need workforce identity management, we at OneLogin have opened our APIs so developers can use our services to authenticate users for their own apps.
Developers will likely discover you because your DevRel team puts out a ton of content about a common problem and has established your company as a prolific influencer in the space. Being an influencer enables you to build a community following and reach a wider audience, which gives your company a direct line to the pulse of what is going on in your industry. Information is power and a great DevRel community puts that information right at your fingertips so you can decide what things to build, how to sell your product, and make your services better.
How we do DevRel at OneLogin
DevRel is a group that partners with external engineers to help them get the most out of your product. At OneLogin, DevRel ensures our developer-customers are able to find and understand our product, solve problems with it, and be part of a great community where they can have their questions and feedback heard. DevRel is a hybrid of many organizations from Engineering to Product, Sales, and Marketing. Combining each organization’s superpowers, DevRel unlocks new business and enables your product to be used in exciting new ways which generates more buzz for your brand.
Developer relations engineers are part Engineer, PM, Solution Architect, and part Influencer. We work with the product group to figure out the “what” and “why” our products should address, engineers to build and ship our products, and marketing to figure out what topics are engaging and how to best position ourselves and our brand. We write articles, demo integrations, and code samples, produce interesting videos, host intriguing podcasts and talks, and hang out on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms. Our aim isn’t to sell, but to build relationships as developers to developers and help them reach their goals.
OneLogin’s DevRel journey is just beginning and we’re inviting everyone to follow us as we build out this program and be part of something amazing while getting in on the ground floor. You can follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn or drop us a line at developers@onelogin.com. We’re also starting up a forum and chat group on Slack or Discord soon and we welcome input as to how you want to engage us.
Dominick is a Senior Software Engineer building a community around OneLogin’s open-source projects, heading up API development, and building cutting-edge developer tools that empower developers to make authentication and access managment easy.