Most companies hire their first DevRel person, give them a conference budget, and call it a program.
Then wonder why it isn’t working.
Developer Relations isn’t a headcount decision. It’s a system. And most teams build it in the wrong order, measure the wrong things, and realize too late that they’ve created a lot of activity without much result.
After partnering with more than 240 developer-focused companies at Stateshift, a clear pattern emerges in what separates programs that compound from programs that stall. This post breaks it down — the roles, the order to hire them, the operating model, and how you know it’s working.
Why Most DevRel Programs Stall Before They Get Traction
Here’s what we see often happen: a company hires a Developer Advocate first. That person starts speaking at conferences and writing blog posts. The content is good. The talks land well. But underneath, there’s no community. No onboarding structure. No system pulling developers in and helping them succeed.
So the advocate is pointing people toward a black hole.
Six months later, leadership wonders why all the activity isn’t producing adoption. The advocate wonders why their work isn’t translating. And the program gets labeled “not working” before it was ever actually built.
The problem isn’t the person. It’s the order.
A developer relations program has four core components: developer onboarding, community infrastructure, content that reduces friction, and feedback loops that connect developers back to product. Build them in the right sequence and they compound. Reverse the order and you end up with effort without traction.
The Core DevRel Roles (And What They Actually Do)
Before getting to sequence, it helps to understand what each role is really responsible for.
Community Manager
This is usually the right first hire, and it’s often undervalued.
A Community Manager owns the day-to-day health of the developer ecosystem. Not just moderation — the infrastructure that makes developers feel like it’s worth showing up. That means onboarding paths, community rituals, early contributor relationships, and the content that removes friction for new developers trying to figure out whether your product is worth their time.
If this work doesn’t happen, onboarding degrades, the community stalls, and every other DevRel function loses its foundation.
Developer Advocate / Evangelist
This is your external communicator. They translate technical value into stories that developers can actually use. Demos, talks, tutorials, videos – the work that builds awareness and pulls developers into your ecosystem.
The key word is into. If there’s no community behind them, no onboarding, no system, an advocate is pointing developers at a door that leads nowhere. The role becomes valuable once the foundation is in place.
Their other job, one that often gets overlooked, is bringing real product feedback back inside the company. A good advocate is a signal system, not just a broadcast channel.
DevRel Engineer
Not every company needs this role, but if you have a technical audience that expects hands-on guidance, it matters.
A DevRel Engineer builds the things developers need to be successful: demo apps, sample code, integration guides, working examples. They’re the bridge between what your product can do and what a developer can actually implement. In API-heavy and platform companies especially, this role accelerates time-to-first-success in ways that documentation alone can’t.
Director of Developer Relations
This is the strategic operator — the person who pulls all the functions together and connects them to business outcomes. They work across product, engineering, and GTM to make sure DevRel isn’t operating in isolation.
You don’t hire this role first. It becomes essential once you have multiple DevRel functions and need someone to create coherence from them.
The Right Order to Hire
If you’re building from zero, sequence matters more than most teams realize.
Start with a Community Manager. Build the foundation: onboarding paths, community rituals, early contributor relationships, and the systems that keep people engaged. This is the infrastructure every other function depends on.
Then bring in a Developer Advocate. Now you have something real to point people toward. The advocate drives awareness and pulls developers into an ecosystem that’s already set up to receive them.
Add a Director of DevRel once you have scale. Strategy, cross-functional alignment, and measurement systems become essential once the program has momentum. Not before.
Teams that reverse this sequence — especially those who lead with strategy or advocacy before the community foundation is in place — almost always hit the same wall. The strategy looks right on paper. Execution keeps falling short.
The DevRel Operating System
The roles matter, but the system is what makes them work. High-performing DevRel programs share four operating principles that hold regardless of company size or stage.
Developer Onboarding Is the First Leverage Point
Every effective DevRel program starts with one question: how quickly can a new developer reach their first meaningful win?
It sounds simple. Most teams can’t answer it cleanly.
In Stateshift’s audits across developer tools, APIs, and SaaS platforms, the friction points are consistent: unclear documentation, missing real-world examples, confusing authentication flows, no clear “first project” path, and content scattered across docs, blog, and GitHub with no thread connecting them.
Improving onboarding is the fastest way to improve activation and retention. Everything else in DevRel accelerates when this is working. Almost nothing else makes up for it when it isn’t.
Community Rituals Drive Engagement
A community without rituals is just a quiet Slack channel.
Rituals — weekly office hours, deep dives, contributor updates, expert sessions, regular meetups — create a sense of how the community works. They set expectations. They give people a reason to keep showing up, and a signal that showing up matters.
These aren’t just events. They’re the infrastructure that makes belonging feel real.
Content Is a Pull, Not a Push
The best DevRel content doesn’t promote your product. It removes friction.
“How to build X using our API.” “The five mistakes developers make integrating Y, and how to avoid them.” “A full working demo for Z use case.” Content that saves developers time and helps them move faster earns trust faster than anything else.
Content that broadcasts features without solving problems gets ignored.
Feedback Loops Make or Break Developer Trust
This is the one most teams underestimate.
Developer trust is more emotional than it looks. If a developer reports a bug or friction and nothing visible happens, they don’t complain. They leave. Quietly.
Strong DevRel programs route feedback into product, close the loop visibly, publish the improvements, and credit the contributors who surfaced the issue. Trust compounds when developers can see their input matter. Silence erodes it, faster than most teams expect.
What DevRel Salaries Look Like
Compensation varies by region, company stage, and whether equity is a significant part of the package. Based on publicly available data as of 2025:
- Community Manager: ~$85K–$130K
- Developer Advocate: ~$120K–$180K
- DevRel Engineer: ~$140K–$200K
- Director of Developer Relations: ~$160K–$240K+
Early-stage startups typically offer lower base salaries with more equity. These ranges should be treated as directional benchmarks, not guarantees — actual compensation depends heavily on market, team size, and scope of responsibility.
How to Measure Whether Your DevRel Program Is Working
DevRel becomes a real function when it’s tied to outcomes you can actually track.
The metrics that matter most:
- Time to first successful API call — the single best proxy for onboarding quality
- Developer activation rate — what percentage of developers who sign up take a meaningful action
- Returning active developers — are people coming back?
- Contributor output — is the community producing real content, integrations, extensions?
- Community health indicators — are discussions happening, or is it quiet?
- Feedback loop closure rate — when developers flag something, what percentage gets acknowledged and acted on?
The metrics to stop relying on: impressions, conference attendance, social follower counts. These are easy to produce and hard to connect to anything that matters to the business.
Stateshift’s approach is to separate vanity metrics from foundational ones, and to build measurement systems that give leadership a clear view of whether the program is creating activation and adoption — not just activity.
What Makes DevRel Succeed (And What Makes It Struggle)
After working with more than 240 developer-focused companies, the pattern is clear.
DevRel succeeds when:
- Onboarding is clean and has a clear owner
- The community has structure and rituals before the advocate starts pointing people at it
- Content reduces friction rather than promoting features
- Engineering and DevRel have a real feedback loop
- Metrics are tied to activation and adoption, not activity
DevRel struggles when:
- Advocacy happens before the community foundation is in place
- The role is treated as a marketing function
- Leadership wants activity instead of systems
- Metrics are vague or ornamental
- There’s no owner for onboarding
Developer Relations isn’t a side project or a nice-to-have. Done right, it’s the strategic engine for developer adoption, retention, and ecosystem growth. The companies that figure that out early tend to build programs that compound. The ones that don’t keep hiring good people into broken systems.
If you’re actively building or rebuilding a DevRel program and want to talk through your situation specifically, book a call with the Stateshift team.
Want to Go Deeper?
Jono Bacon has spent more than 27 years helping developer-focused companies build thriving ecosystems. If you want a more detailed walkthrough of how these roles work in practice including when to hire them, how to structure the program, and what the pitfalls look like from the inside — this short video walks through it clearly.
You can watch it here:
