A strong developer relations (DevRel) team connects your product with developers through community, content, and trust. Building that team well—hiring, focus areas, and culture—has a big impact on developer adoption and long-term developer marketing success. Here are practical strategies and tips.
Hire for diversity and range
DevRel teams that reflect a range of backgrounds, technologies, and perspectives can connect with more of the developer community. DevRel hiring guidance and community-building resources suggest looking for people who can code or deeply understand your stack, communicate clearly, and enjoy teaching and supporting others. Diversity in role types helps too: advocates who speak and write, technical writers who own docs, and community managers who moderate and program events. Together they cover content, events, and day-to-day community health.
Prioritize community building
DevRel’s core job is building and nurturing a community around your product. Community best practices emphasize consistent touchpoints: meetups, office hours, forums or Discord/Slack, and events. Focus on value for developers—learning, networking, influence on the product—rather than pure promotion. Creating a thriving developer community takes time; invest in programming, moderation, and recognition (e.g. MVPs, contributors) so the community feels owned by its members.
Be transparent and authentic
Developers value honesty about limitations, roadmaps, and trade-offs. Transparency in DevRel builds trust and reduces backlash when things go wrong. Share what you’re building and why, acknowledge bugs and delays, and avoid overpromising. Authenticity also means letting advocates speak in their own voice and share real opinions—scripted or corporate tone undermines trust with developers.
Create valuable content
DevRel should produce content that helps developers succeed: documentation, tutorials, SDKs, blog posts, and videos. Google’s E-E-A-T guidance applies: content should be accurate, experience-based where possible, and clearly useful. Work with content and SEO so that content is discoverable and aligned with how developers search and learn.
Foster collaboration and listen
DevRel should make it easy for developers to connect with each other and with your team. Events, hackathons, and online channels create those connections. Listening and feedback loops are critical: use support tickets, community discussions, and surveys to understand pain points and feature requests, and feed that input to product and engineering. Responsiveness—answering questions, following up on issues—signals that you take the community seriously.
Be responsive and available
Developers expect timely answers and visibility into status. Support and community response set the tone for the relationship. Define response-time expectations, document common answers, and escalate when needed. When DevRel is responsive and available, it reinforces that the company values developer success.
Conclusion
Building a strong DevRel team means hiring for diversity and range, prioritizing community, staying transparent, creating valuable content, and listening and responding consistently. For more, see creating a developer advocacy program and developer marketing, advocacy, and relations.