Why Most DevRel Programs Fail (And the Revenue-First Framework That Fixes It)

Here's something most people in this industry won't say out loud: the majority of DevRel programs are set up to fail.

Not because the people running them aren't smart. Not because the companies don't care about developers. They fail because they're measuring the wrong things, reporting to the wrong people, and operating without the systems that would actually prove their value.

I've spent 20 years in developer ecosystems. I've been an engineer, an engineering leader, DevRel at Twitter, Snapchat, Pantheon, Fast, and Lacework. I founded Devocate—which was acquired by Common Room. I've consulted with dozens of developer tool companies on go-to-market strategy. And currently, I'm running Built for Devs, a company that helps dev tool teams understand exactly where their developer experience breaks.

In all of that time, the pattern is the same. DevRel teams ship blog posts, give conference talks, run community Discords, and then struggle to explain why any of it matters when budget season comes around. Meanwhile, sales points to pipeline. Marketing points to MQLs. And DevRel points to… vibes.

That's not good enough. It never was.

I wrote DevRel as a Growth Function: A Developer Adoption Playbook to change that. It's the operating system I've built across nearly a decade of doing this work—opinionated, practical, and designed to turn DevRel from a cost center that gets cut in downturns into a growth engine that earns its seat at the leadership table.

This post walks through the core ideas. The playbook itself contains the complete frameworks, templates, metrics cheat sheets, audit checklists, and implementation timelines you need to actually execute.

DevRel Is a Revenue Function—And That's a Good Thing

Not in the "we should all be salespeople" sense. In the "if you can't draw a line from your work to business outcomes, you don't have a function—you have a hobby" sense.

Every DevRel program needs three north star metrics at the top of the dashboard. Everything else rolls up to these:

Growing developer active users. Not signups—active users. Developers who signed up, got through onboarding, and are actually using your product. A million signups with 2% activation is a marketing problem, not a success story.

Decreasing time-to-value. The elapsed time from a developer's first interaction with your product to the moment they get real value from it. When TTV goes down, everything goes up—conversion, retention, word-of-mouth. Decreasing TTV is the single highest-leverage thing DevRel can do.

Measurable revenue influence. A developer reads your tutorial, tries the product, builds something, and their company becomes a paying customer. That happened because of your work. If you're not tracking it, someone else is getting credit—or worse, nobody is, and the C-suite assumes DevRel doesn't drive revenue.

"Developer engagement" sounds great. It feels good. But it's the wrong target. Engagement is a vanity metric when it's decoupled from adoption. A Discord with 10,000 members and zero correlation to product usage isn't a DevRel win—it's a community management project.

The reframe is simple. Stop asking "how many developers did we talk to?" and start asking "how many developers successfully adopted our product and stayed?"

Validate Before You Scale

Most DevRel programs skip validation and jump straight to content and community. It feels productive—you're publishing, hosting meetups, growing a Discord. But if you haven't validated that you're building for the right developers, solving the right problems, and positioning against the right alternatives, all of that activity is built on assumptions.

The playbook covers three validation tools in detail:

Technical Advisory Boards. Not customers who love you. Practitioners who will tell you hard truths. The common mistake is filling your TAB with fans instead of critics. Your TAB should make you uncomfortable sometimes—that's how you know it's working.

Developer Jobs-to-be-Done Workshops. Developers don't buy products. They hire products to do a job. Structured JTBD workshops reveal what developers are actually trying to accomplish in their daily work—not what they say they want in a survey, but what they're really doing.

ICP Development. Your Ideal Customer Profile defines who you're building for. Get it wrong, and everything downstream—content, community, events, partnerships—targets the wrong people. And here's the part most teams skip: ICP isn't a one-time exercise. It evolves as your product and market evolve.

Every dollar you spend on programs that target the wrong developers is a dollar that generates zero return. Validation isn't preliminary—it's the step that ensures every program you build can draw a line to revenue.

Map the Developer Journey (Then Fix It)

If you can't describe the journey a developer takes from "never heard of you" to "running in production and telling their friends," you can't improve it.

The playbook maps five stages: Discover, Evaluate, Learn, Build, and Scale. Each stage is a place where revenue is either created or lost. A developer who drops off during Learn is revenue that never materializes. A developer who churns during Scale is revenue that walked out the door.

The metric that rules them all? Time-to-value. If I could only track one metric across the entire developer journey, TTV would be it. Everything before TTV is a developer deciding whether you're worth their time. Everything after is a developer who's already decided you are.

Here's the revenue math: if your conversion rate from free to paid is 5%, and decreasing TTV by 30% increases that to 7%, you just grew revenue 40% without spending a dollar on acquisition.

The playbook includes a complete Developer Journey Audit Checklist—specific questions to ask at each stage, what to look for, and how to identify exactly where developers are falling off.

Build a Feedback Engine, Not a Feedback Graveyard

Most companies treat developer feedback as a chore. They set up a form, occasionally read responses, and file them in a spreadsheet nobody looks at.

The companies that win with developers treat feedback as fuel. And the engine has three parts:

Community-centric feedback loops where developers can share input in a context where others can see it, validate it, and build on it. When 47 developers upvote the same request, that's a signal nobody can ignore.

The Product + DevRel partnership—arguably the most important operating principle in the entire playbook. DevRel brings the developer signal. Product makes the prioritization call. You track the outcome together. The product roadmap should have a visible line back to developer feedback.

Closing the loop. The flywheel only works if developers see results. "You asked, we built" communications are one of the highest-trust content formats in DevRel. Developers who see their feedback become product improvements are the ones who write case studies, give conference talks, and stay loyal when competitors come calling.

The revenue math is worth spelling out: advocates refer new developers (acquisition you didn't pay for), write case studies (sales collateral you didn't commission), and defend you in community discussions (retention you couldn't buy).

Content That Developers Actually Trust

Developer content is not marketing content with code snippets sprinkled in. Developers have the most finely-tuned BS detectors of any audience. They can smell a marketing post from the title.

The playbook lays out what actually works—technical tutorials that solve real problems, migration guides that honestly help developers switch, "how we built X" posts, honest comparisons that acknowledge tradeoffs, and friction-pattern posts that address common pain points.

It also covers platform-native distribution strategies (what works on X vs. LinkedIn vs. Reddit vs. Hacker News is completely different) and the "No Pitch Energy" philosophy: your content should be valuable even if the reader never buys your product.

And the unlock most teams miss: distribution matters more than creation. Most teams spend 90% of their energy creating content and 10% distributing it. Flip that ratio.

Measure Like a Revenue Team

If DevRel can't produce a dashboard that maps to business outcomes, it will always be the first team cut in a downturn.

The playbook defines five key numbers every DevRel team needs to report:

1. New developers from new accounts (acquisition)
2. Average product usage per developer (adoption depth)
3. Developers running in production (success)
4. Developers from mid-market to enterprise accounts (revenue potential)
5. Total developers in the community (audience)

Walk into a board meeting with these five numbers trending in the right direction, and nobody questions DevRel's value.

The playbook includes a complete metrics cheat sheet mapping specific metrics to each journey stage, an open-source DevRel Metrics Framework you can self-host and connect to your own tools, and guidance on reporting cadence—what to report weekly, monthly, and quarterly.

Know Your Battlefield

You can't position your product, content, or community strategy without knowing exactly what developers are choosing between.

I track approximately 35 data points across nine categories for every meaningful competitor. The playbook includes the full competitive analysis template and a cadence for staying current—pick one competitor every month and go deep. Don't just research them—use their product. Sign up. Go through onboarding. Deploy something. Experience it the way a developer would.

Then turn that intelligence into positioning opportunities, content opportunities, and product opportunities. Competitive analysis isn't market research—it's revenue defense and revenue capture.

Build the Team to Execute

The best DevRel strategy means nothing without the right team. The playbook covers the player-coach leadership model (you lead strategy AND personally contribute where your skillset has the highest leverage), team structure across five core pillars, hiring for range at early stages, and building revenue accountability into every role from day one.

It also includes a full 30/90/365 implementation plan—what to do in your first week, your first month, your first quarter, and your first year. Plus the five most common failure modes I've watched DevRel programs fall into, and how to avoid each one.

Get the Full Playbook

This post covers the concepts. The playbook contains the complete operating system:

• 9 chapters of strategy, metrics, and implementation guidance
• Metrics Cheat Sheet mapped to every developer journey stage
• Competitive Analysis Template with 35+ data points across 9 categories
• Journey Audit Checklist & Map to find where developers drop off
• 30/90/365 Plan Template for building a revenue-driving function
• Self-Hosted Metrics App you can connect to your own tools [shipping soon]
• Real-World Case Studies from Twitter, Snapchat, and beyond [shipping soon]
• AI-Powered DevRel Tools for common DevRel workflows [shipping soon]
• 25% off your first Built for Devs evaluation for playbook buyers

If you're a DevRel leader building a function, a founder figuring out what "good" looks like, or a practitioner who's tired of activity-based work and ready to level up to outcome-based work—this playbook was built for you.