"Look in your community. Find users of your product or users of your competitor’s product. "
I'm a current DevRel-er myself, and someone recently reached out looking to fill a DevRel role. I told them that I wouldn't actually be a good fit for their product (a CLI tool, and I'm not as die-hard of a CLI user as other devs), and suggested they look within their current user community. That's not always possible, especially for new products, but if a tool is sufficiently used, it's really nice to bring in someone who's genuinely used and loved the product before starting the role.
My hiring history:
* Google Maps DevRel, 2006-2011: I first used Google Maps in my "summer of mashups", just making all kinds of maps, and even used it in a college research project. By the time I started the role, I knew the API quite well. Still had lots to learn in the GIS space, as I was coming from web dev, but at least I had a lot of project-based knowledge to build on.
* Microsoft, 2023-present: My experience was with VS Code and GitHub, two products that I used extensively for software dev. Admittedly, I'd never used Azure (only Google App Engine and AWS) so I had to train up on that rapidly. My experience with the other clouds has helped me with this MS cloud fortunately.
"Look in your community. Find users of your product or users of your competitor’s product. "
I'm a current DevRel-er myself, and someone recently reached out looking to fill a DevRel role. I told them that I wouldn't actually be a good fit for their product (a CLI tool, and I'm not as die-hard of a CLI user as other devs), and suggested they look within their current user community. That's not always possible, especially for new products, but if a tool is sufficiently used, it's really nice to bring in someone who's genuinely used and loved the product before starting the role.
My hiring history:
* Google Maps DevRel, 2006-2011: I first used Google Maps in my "summer of mashups", just making all kinds of maps, and even used it in a college research project. By the time I started the role, I knew the API quite well. Still had lots to learn in the GIS space, as I was coming from web dev, but at least I had a lot of project-based knowledge to build on.
* Microsoft, 2023-present: My experience was with VS Code and GitHub, two products that I used extensively for software dev. Admittedly, I'd never used Azure (only Google App Engine and AWS) so I had to train up on that rapidly. My experience with the other clouds has helped me with this MS cloud fortunately.