Published Dec 10, 2024 by Lee Briggs
Every year, I gear up for “conference season,” which includes KubeCon NA (typically held between mid-October and mid-November) and AWS re:Invent, always the week after Thanksgiving in the US. As a sales engineer, this time of year is exhilarating. It’s a chance to speak with customers, prospects, and technology leaders in the ever-evolving cloud-native and cloud computing spaces.
While I usually leave these events motivated and energized, something this year was different — marked by a noticeable absence. I could count on one hand the number of conversations I had with anyone in Developer Relations (DevRel) - whether they were community builders, developer advocates, or part of any similar role.
Admittedly, some of this could be circumstantial. For instance, KubeCon NA was held in Salt Lake City this year, a location that understandably kept some attendees away. But for me, it felt like a reflection of broader, more fundamental shifts happening in the tech industry.
DevRel has always been a role that defies simple definition. It’s not marketing, but it overlaps with marketing. It’s not sales, but it supports sales. It’s not customer success, but it builds relationships with users. And it’s certainly not engineering, though it requires technical skills.
It demands a rare combination of traits: technical aptitude, charisma, and customer empathy. Having worked in a DevRel role for six months, I can attest - it’s one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had.
When done well, DevRel can be transformative. Companies like HashiCorp, Stripe, and Twilio have built exceptional brands in part due to their effective DevRel strategies. But the very ambiguity that has been DevRel’s strength is now starting to feel like a liability.
During my brief stint in DevRel, I often asked my manager, “What does good performance look like in this role?” The answer, more often than not, was fuzzy.
For example, I spent hours answering questions in community Slack channels. It felt impactful, but we couldn’t quantify how it moved the needle on metrics like sales pipeline or customer retention. I gave virtual conference talks, but we struggled to tie those efforts to lead generation or brand impact.
I don’t think this is unique to my experience. Many DevRel professionals resist being measured by traditional KPIs, arguing their work is about “building community,” “fostering trust,” or “engaging developers.” While those outcomes are valuable, they’re hard to quantify in ways a CFO or board member cares about.
Then, external factors came along and forced everyone to take a harder look at roles like DevRel.
For much of the 2010s, startups existed in a world of near-limitless capital. Low interest rates made borrowing cheap, and VCs funded companies generously, hoping to catch the next unicorn. In this environment, initiatives without immediate ROI—like DevRel—had room to thrive.
DevRel was a long-term investment: build trust, foster adoption, grow communities, and the payoff will come eventually. It worked as long as companies didn’t have to justify those investments on a quarterly basis.
But the money printer stopped. Rising interest rates and tightening VC funding forced startups to prioritize sustainability over growth at all costs. Every team came under scrutiny, and functions that didn’t directly contribute to revenue found themselves in jeopardy.
DevRel, for all its intangible benefits, became a glaring target.
In tough times, businesses ask hard questions: “Which teams are directly contributing to the bottom line?” DevRel often struggled to answer.
By contrast, roles like sales, marketing, and engineering have clear outputs tied to outcomes. Sales closes deals. Marketing generates leads. Engineering ships features. DevRel, sitting somewhere between these disciplines, risks being seen as neither fish nor fowl—doing a little of everything but owning none of it.
Compounding DevRel’s challenges is the rise of Product-Led Growth (PLG). In a PLG model, the product sells itself through intuitive design, freemium tiers, and frictionless onboarding. Developers don’t need a community advocate or a conference talk—they sign up, try the product, and decide for themselves.
Now, I have strong opinions on PLG—freemium tiers are becoming harder to sustain as the cost of compute rises. But the theory remains sound. Companies like my current employer, Tailscale, have nailed this approach. You can grow your user base organically without the overhead of a dedicated DevRel team.
This isn’t to say DevRel is useless in a PLG world, but it does mean the traditional role—focused on advocacy and education—may no longer be as critical.
Despite the title of this post, I don’t think DevRel is truly dead. The need for technical advocacy and community building hasn’t disappeared - it’s just evolving. Many of the developer relations engineers that have survived this change have embraced the shift into marketing, leaning on their expertise as content generators to create documentation, tutorials, write blog posts and generate video content for YouTube. At Tailscale, we often seen incredible engagement with our content team and wonderful feedback from our YouTube channel. What’s been so obvious about the success here is that they’re measurable outcomes, and the people in these roles have embraced the challenges around having measurable goals.
Content generations is only one part of the DevRel flywheel, and I think I can see a world where we have specific personas tied to different parts of the business that have focus on the parts of a DevRel job that each line of business care about, such as:
Community Solutions Engineer
A blend of solutions engineering and DevRel, focused on driving adoption at the top of the funnel while contributing to measurable ARR metrics.
Community Customer Success
Ensuring existing customers are successful, reducing churn, and driving expansion revenue.
Community Data Engineer
Using analytics to tie activities to outcomes like product adoption, retention, or revenue growth.
The common thread? Measurability. The days of vague metrics like “community engagement” are over.
What we’re witnessing isn’t the death of DevRel—it’s a wake-up call. The traditional model, reliant on soft metrics and long-term value propositions, can’t survive unchanged.
The good news is that there’s still a place for DevRel. Professionals who adapt—aligning their work with sales, customer success, or product teams—will continue to thrive. Those who resist change may not.
The industry has shifted. The question is: will DevRel shift with it?