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"A good life"—one might think at first glance, looking at what the DevRel team does on a daily basis. However, the everyday reality of those in this role is far from easy. The income DevRel teams generate is not direct, and much of the long-term work they do often remains practically invisible. Additionally, a person in this position must be ready to manage intense emotions boiling amongst developers.
Sounds tough? Don’t get discouraged, because as SJ Morris proves, DevRel is an incredibly rewarding role. Driven by interest and a desire to help others, it allows you to witness the power of community firsthand and move mountains for its sake. Her years of experience in the industry, which she shares in a conversation with Jarek Jarzębowski, can serve as a guide if you're considering a career in DevRel.
What’s the profile of an ideal candidate for this field? What skills should you have? What determines the DevRel strategy? Find answers to these and other questions!
Key Takeaways from the Conversation
Community is the Key: DevRel bridges the community and the company, enabling both to grow and benefit from one another. Community sits at its heart. A person working in this role stays behind the scenes, creating an environment in which the community can thrive.
Strength Lies in Diversity: Advocacy and community are core elements of DevRel. Ideally, marketing, events and technical writing also make its part. Some say marketing isn’t necessary, as DevRel professionals may avoid it, but effective communication is impossible without it.
There is No Universal Path in Dev Rel: DevRel strategy depends strongly on a company’s size, stage of growth, and buyer demographics. Sometimes DevRel is a full market strategy, but often, you'll only need to build a DevRel team later, once product efforts have settled. Understanding your buyer structure is crucial to optimizing your DevRel strategy.
Follow Your Interest: Like marketing, DevRel is multidimensional, with many opportunities to explore. Interest is the most crucial factor—you need to observe and absorb what's happening in the niche. Contrary to popular belief, being extroverted or constantly social isn't a must. There’s no specific characteristic required to achieve success in this niche.
It's Not Always a Piece of Cake: Versatility is key, especially in smaller companies. You also need to be creative and resilient. Many interactions start with frustration, and this role can be challenging. You should be capable of turning that frustration into motivation to help others. People in this role are often driven by a desire to assist others.
Programming and Networking: If you're just starting, you likely need some basic programming skills. Networking can help you pave the ways in this niche. With more in-person meetups and conferences than ever, you should be prepared to participate in such events.
Dev Rel's Impact Can Be Hard to Notice at First Sight: DevRel doesn’t directly contribute to revenue, so layoffs can happen if the company doesn’t attribute its impact to success. The hardest part is proving your contributions and the importance of the role. Building influence, in addition to reporting and analytics, can help showcase your value.
Conversation with SJ Morris
Jarek Jarzębowski: Hello, SJ, and welcome to the Advocu podcast. I'm really glad to have you here to talk about DevRel.
SJ Morris: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the offer. I'm excited to be here.
Jarek Jarzębowski: I saw that you recently returned to HubSpot after some time away, but your experience in DevRel goes back much further. Could you share more about your background and what you've been doing in DevRel?
SJ Morris: Sure, I'm happy to talk about it. Normally, I'm a bit shy to go into my background, but it ties in nicely with today’s topic. I joke that in the last five years, I’ve been playing the "Goldilocks" of DevRel—trying different companies until I found the one that feels just right, which is HubSpot. I got into DevRel in 2011, which seems crazy to me now, but it’s been about 13 years.
Before that, I had a mix of roles in marketing and community building. I stumbled into DevRel by joining a small startup in Montreal, Canada, one of the first API-as-a-product companies, around 2012. We were paying attention to Twilio, SendGrid, and other API-first companies, and that’s when I got a crash course in DevRel. Since then, I’ve worked at companies of various sizes, including the startup I mentioned, which was called Context.io. I moved to San Francisco to work at Mashery, where I learned a lot about advocacy.
I’ve also worked at Intuit, MailChimp, and Shopify, then HubSpot for a while. I ran my own thing for a minute, which taught me a lot about running a business, and eventually, I made my way back to HubSpot. Throughout, I’ve found my niche in working with community within DevRel. It’s important to highlight the different aspects of DevRel and the various focuses one can take, rather than just seeing DevRel as a single opportunity. I’d love to discuss that further.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Yeah, I think using the term DevRel is similar to using the term marketing—you can do many different things in marketing, and the same applies to DevRel.
SJ Morris: Exactly.
Jarek Jarzębowski: You’ve found your niche in developer community, but what does that really mean for you? What does DevRel consist of, and how do you define developer community?
SJ Morris: I might be biased, but I feel that community sits at the heart of DevRel. To me, DevRel is a center of connection, both internally and externally. On one side, you have the developer community building on these platforms using APIs, and on the other, the company, like HubSpot, which is constantly shipping updates. We need to communicate with our community about these changes, and the community tells us what they need to succeed.
It’s not just about feedback; it’s also about inspiration and modeling what we want the community to build and how we want it to behave. DevRel connects these two worlds in different ways. Historically, DevRel has been heavily linked to advocacy, and advocates are like performers or stars of the show. They engage with the community and model the behavior and work we want to see from developers. Advocates are the face of the developer products, and they provide a direct point of contact for the community.
For me, the community is a space where developers connect with one another. I see myself as the stage manager behind the scenes, ensuring the best possible environment for developers to connect, learn from each other, and interact with advocates. We create spaces where developers feel comfortable sharing what they want to see from us, what content they need, and how we can improve their experience.
At HubSpot, we liken it to the "DevRel butterfly." The company is on one side, the community on the other, and DevRel is the body of the butterfly, connecting these two wings and making sure they interact. I may have used too many metaphors there, but the point is, DevRel is the center of connection, and community is the space where it happens.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Let me take your metaphor a bit further. You mentioned being a stage manager, setting the stage for the community. HubSpot is a big company, as are Shopify and MailChimp, which you also worked for. But what about smaller companies? Can they create a stage for DevRel, or do they operate on a smaller scale that isn’t enough to call it DevRel? Is DevRel only for the big ones, or can anyone use it?
SJ Morris: That’s a great question, and let’s stretch the metaphor a bit more. When I think of HubSpot’s developer stage, it’s like there’s a theater festival with many performances happening at once. We need to know when to focus on the developer stage and when to pay attention to other areas. HubSpot has Inbound, a big conference every year, where the developer presence is small, but the focus is on our main customer base—marketing, sales, and service.
For a startup, though, it’s more like a single stage. The nature of the company matters. In developer-first companies, where developers are the buyers, DevRel could be the entire go-to-market strategy. In companies like HubSpot, developers add value for customers, but they’re not the buyers. DevRel treats them as customers, but we’re one of the few teams that elevate developers in that way.
If your company relies on an ecosystem for success, you need DevRel. For developer-first products, DevRel is almost your entire go-to-market strategy. However, if there’s no platform or ecosystem, DevRel might not be necessary. Some startups bring in a "Jack or Jane of all trades" to build an early-stage DevRel strategy. In those cases, I recommend starting with the basics—focus on API consistency, developer experience, and great documentation. You don’t need to grow a DevRel team early on. Lay the foundations first, then build out the team when the product is ready.
Jarek Jarzębowski: I know there might not be an ideal DevRel team structure, but in other departments like marketing, there’s usually a typical structure. What would be the core structure of a DevRel team, in your opinion?
SJ Morris: I love this question. I’ve seen different structures across companies. At HubSpot, we have several pillars because we do many different things with multiple integration points. But generalizing, I’d say Advocacy and Community are core. Advocacy involves those key individuals—the stars of the show—who engage with the community. Community is about creating spaces, programs, and interactions for the community to connect and engage with the company.
In an ideal world, marketing and events would also be part of DevRel. Developer marketing should support getting the word out to the community in a structured way. Marketing is often seen as something developers are allergic to, but it’s crucial for communicating effectively. Events, whether online or offline, are still important for activating and inspiring the community, and they should be tightly aligned with marketing to measure their impact. That’s my dream structure, but it doesn’t always work that way in practice.
And then, there's a number of other things. Technical writing could start to fit into that a little bit, which covers documentation. But sometimes documentation is part of a larger knowledge team at a company. It all depends on the size. But I think the key things are developer experience, developer marketing, and community advocacy.
Jarek Jarzębowski: These might be quite distant roles in some companies. Maybe different roles with different skills that you might need to be successful in these positions. Who, in your opinion, can be quote-unquote successful in DevRel? Is there a specific skill set you need to get into DevRel and be successful, or are there characteristics that make some people more suitable for certain DevRel roles than others?
SJ Morris: This is a fun question because I think if you had asked me 10 years ago, I'd say, "Oh, you need to be an extrovert, comfortable interacting with people all day." I don't think that's true at all anymore.
I feel strongly that if you see what's happening in different parts of DevRel, and it interests you, then almost certainly there's something you can do. Of course, there are certain requirements depending on the role and the company's needs. But for someone brand new to DevRel, who loves interacting with developers, inspiring them, and making sure they're successful, there are different paths to take. I've seen folks start as junior advocates and find a niche.
Even within our advocacy team, we have—well, the team is growing a lot. Chris Riley leads our advocacy team, and he's great. He's written some books on developer marketing and developer relations. He leads our advocates, and they each have their own niche. I believe that as we grow at HubSpot, they'll take on more specific domains they've become experts in. For example, AJ and Ashley are great with internal DevRel and ops.
That's something popping up more and more—internal workings, organizing Jira tickets, using tools like Common Room to track the community, and making sure it's set up well for developer advocates to succeed. That's one niche. We also have another advocate, David, who is well-versed in the technical nuances of building on HubSpot, specifically around our API structure.
David has been at HubSpot for 12 years, and we call him "The HubSpot Legend." We're lucky to have him because he knows everything about the infrastructure and helps us out of tricky situations.
I think that once folks get excited about DevRel and learn about the different opportunities, they gravitate toward a niche that works for them. I'm not going to say there's any one specific characteristic needed. It’s more about how you respond to hearing about these roles. If they excite you and your journey aligns with the opportunity, you can step into it.
We can talk about what that journey might look like if you want.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Yes, but first I want to ask, what makes you so interested in community? You mentioned that if you find something, you can grow into it, and for you, that’s been the community space.
Why is it so interesting to you? And, this might be a tricky question, but what makes you a good community person, and what makes someone successful in a community role?
SJ Morris: I love this question. When I first started in DevRel, I was wearing many hats. It was a tiny startup—two engineers and me. I was doing everything that wasn't building the product, which was the most important thing. But I was getting the word out—doing marketing, community, product management, the whole mishmash.
It was a crash course in everything involved with making a developer product successful. What stood out to me and gave me the most satisfaction was when we started gathering people. We would host events or go to hackathons, and seeing developers use our product in real time, collaborating with each other, was the most fun.
Back in 2012-2013, hackathons were amazing. Companies with APIs would come together, and the spirit of hackathons was incredible. I don't see it happening the same way anymore, but in any case, those events where I talked to folks in DevRel and developers being super creative with APIs—it was so much fun in person.
I naturally gravitated toward bringing developers together to do cool things. I also had a background in community at previous companies. Community was still a poorly understood term back then, but I liked that. The spirit of what I’m doing is trying to bring people together.
I can be creative in this role. There's also this layer of importance to me—creating psychologically safe and healthy spaces. Codes of conduct, inclusion, making sure we're welcoming to newbies, to folks new to HubSpot or whatever community—it’s those things that got me excited about community.
Jarek Jarzębowski: I know being a community person—whether community manager, head of community, or however you call it—means wearing quite a few hats. How do you cope with different initiatives, activities, and roles within the community? I know it can be quite difficult.
SJ Morris: I won’t talk too much about HubSpot’s internal structure because we're growing fast, and things change all the time. But we have this incredible community manager, JC Lewis. They work on the forum side and aren't technically part of the DevRel team, but we work closely together.
JC's role is a million times harder than mine. I’ve reached a point where I create strategies and, like I said, act as a stage manager. I'm not in the thick of it every day.
Community managers moderate, make sure folks get answers to their questions, and connect people. We have wonderful personalities building on HubSpot, starting conversations and asking questions. I love the developer community because they’re transparent. They’ll tell you exactly how they feel.
But the flip side is, sometimes they tell you how they feel, right? They don’t mince words. It takes a specific type of person to appease people. I often say the first point of contact in a developer community is when a developer is frustrated with something. Most touchpoints start with frustration.
If a good community manager, like JC, handles that frustration well, it turns into developers coming back to help others. JC does a great job connecting them with the right resources. That job is hard and frustrating. In the community world, you have to put in your time as a community manager. I did it for a long time, and it was tough. I still do it to some extent now, but it’s not my entire day anymore.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Let's hope we haven’t scared everyone off. Let’s assume someone listening wants to get into DevRel or a community role. Or maybe they've done something connected to DevRel and want to get into community more broadly—not specifically as a community manager, but in a role involving community.
How can someone grow the skills needed for that? Since it's not like studying marketing or computer science, how can you grow your skills to become a relevant and successful DevRel professional?
SJ Morris: I often feel lucky that I got into DevRel when I did. Fun fact, I don’t consider myself a programmer. I know just enough to empathize with developers and work with these communities. But I rely heavily on my programmer and engineering colleagues to get my work done.
If you're starting now, you probably do need to be a programmer to some level. I don't personally think it's a must, but I see how companies are hiring. It’s one of the prerequisites for most DevRel jobs—community, advocacy, even to some extent technical marketing. You need to have some programming chops and be able to build something basic using the company’s APIs or platform.
In fact, one of the tests for the job is often building something with the company's APIs. I don't want to discourage people who aren't programmers because I still believe there’s a place for non-programmers in DevRel. It takes all kinds to make this industry successful. But the reality is: get some coding chops. Do a few courses.
If you're new to this world, chances are you’ve dabbled in some code or been exposed to programming. There are many courses, and I can recommend some. I already mentioned my colleague Chris Riley, who’s written a couple of books—one on developer marketing and another on developer advocacy.
What got me to where I am was networking. It can be challenging, especially for introverts, which I consider myself to be. I guess I'm what they call an ambivert—sometimes extroverted, sometimes not. I think most people can relate.
Now more than ever, we’re returning to meetups and conferences. I’m not sure if you’ll be at the DevRel conference in New York, but it’s nice to see that coming back. In-person interactions, reaching out to people you admire, were key for me.
Early on, I reached out to someone I admired—Tim Falls, who worked at SendGrid and did community for various developer-facing companies. He became one of my casual mentors. I believe people attracted to this role are often happy to help others. If you find someone doing great work, reach out. Ask if you can chat, get to know them, ask them to introduce you to others.
That approach can be surprisingly successful. Making connections was what worked well for me and is what I've heard works for others too.
Jarek Jarzębowski: I guess the "relations" part in DevRel stands for something, so you need to build.
SJ Morris: Yeah, relations, community, it's all there, right?
Jarek Jarzębowski: Exactly. But I also know that there are people saying that maybe because of the coding skills as a proposition or maybe for other reasons like layoffs in the DevRel space, it’s not so easy to find a job in DevRel. What’s your take on that? Is it easy? Is it not? Is it easier than it was because there are more companies dabbling with DevRel? Or is it more difficult? What might be your recommendations for people, apart from growing the relations part?
SJ Morris: Yeah. I feel very blessed that I've managed to hold on to my job amidst all these layoffs. It’s an existential threat in the background all the time. I think we can all relate to that. I know so many wonderful people who have been laid off. The first thing to keep in mind, and this might be a bit of a privileged take since I’m still employed for now—knock on wood—is how I’ve seen the shifts happen. A company drops a big chunk of its team, and maybe they’ll get rid of their DevRel team at one company. Then another company seems to hire more while others are laying off. It’s shifting around rather than dropping overall.
A company might get to a point where they don’t see DevRel as essential. It’s not always the spirit of a layoff, but let’s say in most cases, if they get rid of the full DevRel team or some individuals, they’re deciding that those roles aren’t essential for them to maintain success or business. That’s one of the risks we run because a lot of times, DevRel is not a direct revenue contributor. There is indirect revenue.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Yeah, so how can you make yourself, or the DevRel that you represent, essential?
SJ Morris: That’s honestly the hardest part of my job, and every team I’ve been on. On a good day, about 20% of the work is showcasing the impact of your role. Every time you finish a project, you need to share it—create a slide deck, a Loom, share it in Slack, make sure it gets to the right people in the company so they know we’re around and making an impact. Reporting is more important now than it used to be. Common Room is a tool we use to measure community, and it lets us make very direct correlations to ROI with our community initiatives and content. We can see how the content our team creates correlates with customer actions.
Even if your company doesn’t have this, making analytics and reporting a priority is essential. If you don’t have that job yet, the cool thing about DevRel is that there are so many extracurricular ways to showcase your skills. We just brought someone onto our team from another engineering team at HubSpot. She had never done DevRel, but she was making incredible TikToks and has 13,000 followers, plus a YouTube channel with great learning content. Because of her ability to communicate and educate, it was a no-brainer to bring her onto the team.
There are open-source projects, hackathons, and so many places for developers to showcase their skills. While I don’t think you need to be an influencer to be a successful advocate, it doesn’t hurt, especially when folks are saying they learned from you and were inspired by you. I could go on, but I’ll pause to see if you want to follow up.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Apart from being an influencer, how can you show value inside the company? You mentioned that reporting is crucial—showing work in Slack channels, in meetings, doing Looms, etc. But how can you show the value of DevRel when there’s no direct line from community initiatives to revenue?
SJ Morris: The way we do it at HubSpot has been the most effective across the companies I’ve worked for. First, if you’re looking for a job, see where DevRel lives in the company. I feel like DevRel being in the product and engineering org is crucial. Others might say it doesn’t matter if it’s in marketing or some community org, but being tightly connected to product and engineering is the most impactful way to show success.
At HubSpot, we have a process that changes names but involves creating year-long objectives and goals. These goals come from the top, then cascade down into each product team, including DevRel. Each layer has metrics, and we can demonstrate that we’re hitting our metrics and goals. The idea is to create a waterfall effect where at the end of the year, we can reverse the process and show how our work influenced the company’s bottom line.
For individuals, make sure that your performance reviews show how the projects you work on correlate directly to the DevRel goals that roll up to the company’s most important objectives. In DevRel, it’s easy to take on a million different projects or drop everything to help someone. But the challenge is staying focused on your goals. Hopefully, those goals influence the company’s broader goals, and there’s space for longer-term work since a lot of DevRel work is long-term, especially community work. But proving value year over year by connecting to top-level goals is essential. Does that help?
Jarek Jarzębowski: Definitely. I want to underscore that because I truly believe that business thinking is a core skill, not just for DevRel but for everyone. If you know the objectives for the year or quarter, you can think about how your initiatives apply to them and move the goal forward, even if just a little. That’s the way to think about your job.
SJ Morris: 100%. And for those doing open-source or other work outside of a company, being able to show the impact when you’re looking for a job makes a difference too.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Definitely. It sounds obvious that you need to move toward company objectives, but I’ve seen people doing things just for the sake of doing them. That’s not the way to go. If you want to be successful, you need to know the objectives you’re trying to fulfill.
SJ Morris: I’d also tie this back to our conversation on layoffs. I can’t speak for how it worked at companies where folks I know were laid off, but if they weren’t in a position to demonstrate their success in relation to the company’s success, it’s unfortunate. DevRel used to have more freedom to experiment. Back in the day, my team went to hackathons every weekend. We’d say, “We were at 200 hackathons this year,” but what was the impact? We didn’t really know.
Jarek Jarzębowski: When the money’s flowing, you can do more. But when times are tough, you need to know what you’re doing and why.
I feel like we could talk for hours, but time’s running out. Thank you for sharing your perspective and experience. I hope we can talk again later, but before we wrap up, where can people find you if they want to dig deeper or ask you more questions?
SJ Morris: LinkedIn is the best place. If you connect with me, just mention you heard me on this podcast. I don’t usually accept people I haven’t met, but if you mention the podcast, I’ll connect with you. You can find me at linkedin.com/in/sarahjanemorris. I used to be active on Twitter, but not anymore. You can still follow me there at @SarahJaneMorris, but I tweet like every six months. I do check my DMs there though. This has been lovely, and I’d love to reconnect another time.
Jarek Jarzębowski: Great! We’ll add the link to your LinkedIn in the show notes. Let’s keep bringing value and showing that DevRel is truly essential.
SJ Morris: And still fun! It won’t work if you’re not having fun!
SJ Morris’ Background
Numerous years in marketing, community building, and over a decade in Developer Relations—SJ Morris is a seasoned DevRel professional with 13 years of experience. Having begun her journey in 2011 at a small API startup in Montreal, she quickly gained valuable insights into the emerging API-first companies like Twilio and SendGrid.
Over the years, she has worked at companies of all sizes, including Mashery, Intuit, MailChimp, Shopify, and HubSpot, where she honed her skills in advocacy and community engagement. Today, she is a respected leader in DevRel, with a focus on community building and exploring the multidimensional aspects of the field.
Closing Thoughts
DevRel wears many hats, just as SJ did at the beginning of her career. It’s also a field that changes very dynamically, but some things remain constant. The most important are passion and a desire to help others—these are the foundations for anyone in DevRel.
SJ Morris doesn’t sugarcoat the reality—stepping into DevRel, especially today, comes with certain challenges. The importance of networking and how essential basic programming skills have become in this role—these are things you should be aware of when pursuing a career in DevRel. But it is totally worth it. If you are truly interested in what you do, you will enjoy the ride - and have a lot of fun on the way.
