August 2021 Update: Here is part 2 of this post that gets into full detail on DevRel KPIs: youtube.com/watch?v=KrqfqyN2FTs

Purpose

I noticed when the term “Measuring Success/KPIs” comes up, it’s a hard discussion to have as not everyone has clearly defined these metrics or they may be struggling to define KPIs that quantifiably prove the value a Developer Relations (DevRel) organization contributes to the bottom line. . So as a group, we came up with a generic list that a DevRel team out there may find very helpful.

This is intended more as a discussion starter here on dev.to as every item is worthy of its own thread. Or if you have any information that would be valuable, please include it in the comments below, and I can add you as a contributor. (include your twitter handle).

The Seattle DevRel community came together to meet at the Microsoft Reactor to listen to a few talks, network, and learn from each other. On top of that, we did a group project where we compiled lists of the ways we measure success.

“What do you measure that benefits your team?” means the things you track that are valuable to your team, but not necessarily data that the higher ups need to see consistently. Then there’s the KPIs that align with company-wide KPIs. Although there were two questions asked, we realized that some metrics a DevRel team would track wouldn’t work for other teams in the company but they still worked for measuring their individual team's goals and contributions.

The Question:

What do you measure that benefits your team? What do you measure that is valuable to higher ups? How does this align with company wide KPIs?

1. Internally evangelizing and getting developers from other teams involved in speaking engagements.
2. Defining what success looks like in different social media channels: impressions, likes, reposts, shares, etc. and assigning a value to each action.
3. Partner networking, blogs (Sales Qualified Leads) grow usage down the road and turn into paying customers
4. MQLs (Marketing qualified leads)
5. Engagements for developer focused websites specific to language
6. Traffic to your DevRel-managed websites.
7. Number of speaking engagements and number of attendees in your talks
8. Number of sponsored events / attendance. Leads per event.
9. # of champions and engagement with their activities, growth of champions.
10. # of partners or developers that are engaging with our content
11. Code contributions by external developers and what people are actually doing.
12. External growth and feedback
13. What "Thought leadership" means for your product and how you measure it.
14. Decrease the number of support requests while increasing the numbers of self-served users via the docs
15. Customer sentiment favorability survey and what is the score/target for 16. onboarding experience (NPS)
16. Growth/number of 3rd party applications/extensions (marketplace, developer activity)
17. # of unique visitors to content/engagement of content (sample code, PRs, Tutorials, Bug submissions, live-stream content)
18. Decrease time to activation: end of onboarding, time to deploying first project
19. Increase time to deactivation
20. Measuring post sign-up activities/engagement, usage beyond simply downloading
21. Stackoverflow posts, forum activities, Slack forum, any collaboration tool. How many users there? How many questions there?
22. Feedback into product roadmap, number of feature requests into product
23. Number of user/paid user signups
24. Number of 3rd party blog posts/tutorials about product (organic press mentions)
25. Awareness of your company to developers you’re looking to hire
26. Decrease customer churn
27. Attributed SQLs/MQLs (Ex: Visited docs before becoming MQL)
28. Organic social media mentions
29. Number of Downloads
30. Think of where DevRel sits in your organization. It may affect (OKR) 31. objectives down the road.
31. PR Analyst involvement
32. # of events planned / tracking industry engagements
33. Number of partnerships with technologies to create integrations between both products.
34. Influencers sharing/writing/mentioning about your product to their developer following
35. DevRel solved recognized problems.
36. Weekly SDK downloads
37. Making sure what you're measuring aligns with company goals
38. Awareness of what you are measuring and why
39. Landing features that meet established customer needs (and getting the data to establish them)

Discussion

* Discuss an item on the list and add your feedback

* Add your input that isn't on the list to share with the #DevRel community

Group Project Contributors:

Tessa Mero
Jessica West
Carter Rabasa
Melissa Thorne
Paul Oliver
Mike Mast
Aeva
Chris Griffing
Lauren Lee
Ishan Anand
Jon Peck
Geraldine Zanolli
Dawn Parzych
Ann Spahr
Jaime Lopez Jr
Kevin McIntosh

Content Editor Contributor:

Greg Bulmash

Dev.To Contributors:

TBD