Why Business Literacy Matters for DevRel  ## Metadata - Author: [[Matty Stratton]] - Full Title: Why Business Literacy Matters for DevRel - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [DevRel, Business, Metrics] author: Matty Stratton source: dev.to reference: [https://dev.to/mattstratton/why-business-literacy-matters-for-devrel-and-why-you-cant-skip-this-step-30p1] date created: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}} --- # 🏷️ Title: Why Business Literacy Matters for DevRel (And Why You Can't Skip This Step) ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - Include links cited in or relevant to the article. ## 📝 Summary - What happened: The author argues DevRel struggles not because “the business doesn’t get DevRel,” but because DevRel lacks business literacy. - Why it matters: Budget survival and strategic influence require fluency in sales, marketing, and finance to translate DevRel impact. - Key stakeholders: DevRel teams/leaders, Sales, Marketing, Finance, executives. - Risks and tradeoffs: Over-indexing on vanity metrics; perceived “selling out”; under-communicated impact leading to cuts. - Bottom line: Become bilingual—map DevRel work to commercial outcomes to advocate, align, and survive. ## 📖 Main Content - Core argument: DevRel must “speak business” to show value; impressions and community growth don’t answer ARR, pipeline, or cost-per-lead questions. - Context/definitions: - ARR: recurring revenue; a core financial metric. - CapEx vs OpEx: capitalized vs operational expenses; matters to finance planning. - Funnel stages: awareness → consideration → conversion; marketing’s model for attribution. - Product-Led Growth: product usage drives acquisition/expansion; complements DevRel’s developer-first motion. - Uncertainties: Exact KPI frameworks and attribution details deferred to future posts; this piece focuses on foundations, not metrics. ### 🗒️ Notes - “The problem is that DevRel doesn't understand business.” - Disconnect: DevRel cites impressions/Discord growth; leadership asks about ARR, CPL, sourced pipeline. - “You can't effectively measure and demonstrate your value if you don't understand the fundamentals of how the business actually works.” - Goal: “Becoming bilingual” to converse with Sales (pipeline), Finance (budgets, P&L), Marketing (funnel). - Series scope: Sales 101, Marketing 101, Finance 101, plus PLG as a complement. - Payoff: Better advocacy, alignment, survival during cuts, and partnerships. - “The best part about ‘selling out’? You get paid.” ## 📚 References - Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) overview (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/annual-recurring-revenue.asp) - CapEx vs. OpEx explained (https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-difference-between-capital-expenditures-capex-and-operating-expenses-opex.asp) - Marketing funnel stages (https://www.shopify.com/blog/marketing-funnel) - Product-Led Growth primer (https://www.productled.org/blog/what-is-product-led-growth) - Developer Relations overview (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_relations) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - Paragraph A: The issue isn’t that companies fail to grasp DevRel; DevRel often fails to translate its work into business terms that budget owners use. - Paragraph B: Vanity metrics create a language gap; leaders want ARR, pipeline, and costs, not impressions or community size. ## 📰 Newsletter - DevRel teams are under pressure to prove value. This piece argues the fix is business literacy: map advocacy, content, and community to pipeline, ARR, and funnel stages. Coming next: Sales, Marketing, and Finance 101 for DevRel, plus PLG fit. Brush up on ARR and CapEx/OpEx, then audit your dashboard to swap vanity metrics for revenue-adjacent signals. ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Define influence/sourced pipeline from events, content, and demos; document deal acceleration anecdotes. - Build education tracks tied to product activation and expansion. - Ship examples/SDKs mapped to key use cases and revenue segments. - Create top/mid/bottom-funnel content with UTMs; align on attribution rules. - Run community surveys tied to activation, retention, and expansion. - Establish quarterly reviews with Sales/Marketing/Finance; publish feedback loops. #### OSPO - Clarify contribution charters and decision rights that support go-to-market. - Automate license scanning and set review SLAs. - Maintain vuln intake and embargo playbooks; sign releases. - Track SBOM freshness and ownership. - Offer contributor legal guardrails and office hours. - Fund critical upstreams; sign MoUs with key projects. - Report OSS impact in executive scorecards. #### Community - Host roadmap clinics; publish governance templates. - Create contributor onboarding paths and pairing rotations. - Share sponsor budgets and milestone-based reports. - Practice cross-project incident drills and disclosure norms. #### WordPress - Core: triage, performance budgets, release criteria. - Core Performance: dashboards and perf bounties. - Core AI: responsible guardrails and eval sets. - Core Program Team: rituals, dependencies, retros. - Mobile: telemetry and offline UX improvements. - Playground: browser labs and reproducible bugs. - Community/Training/Marketing/Support/Design/Docs: fill gaps with examples-first patterns, editorial calendars, and SLAs. - Accessibility/Meta/CLI/Hosting/Tide/Openverse/Themes/Plugins: audits, scoring transparency, review throughput, provenance checks. #### The WPCC - Programs: fellowships, microgrants, stipends. - Projects: governance clinics, doc sprints. - Funding experiments: matched grants and milestone payouts. ### FAIR - Independence: local metadata and signature checks. - Policies: transparent funding, sunset clauses. - Governance artifacts: charters and scorecards. ## 🧪 Hypotheses - H1: Teaching DevRel basic sales/marketing/finance increases budget approval rates within two quarters. - H2: Translating activities to pipeline/ARR reduces DevRel layoffs during downturns. - H3: PLG+DevRel orgs see higher activation-to-paid conversion than marketing-led-only orgs. - H4: Executive satisfaction with DevRel rises when reports swap vanity metrics for revenue-adjacent metrics. ### 📊 Methodology - Pre/post training quasi-experiment across teams; measure budget approvals, headcount stability, exec NPS. - Compare conversion and activation in PLG+DevRel cohorts vs controls. - Content and event attribution via UTMs, assisted conversion windows, and pipeline stage tagging. ### ❓ Questions - Which revenue-adjacent metrics best capture DevRel’s deal acceleration? - How should Finance model DevRel as OpEx with long-tail impact? - What PLG motions amplify community-led adoption? ### 🔮 Future Research - Longitudinal studies on DevRel’s retention and expansion impact. - Standardized attribution models for community touchpoints. ### 💡 Implications - Practice: Adopt bilingual reporting (developer + business). - Policy: Tie budgets to strategic objectives and measurable outcomes. - Security: Include disclosure and signing in DevRel demos/docs. - Education: Core business literacy in DevRel onboarding. - Funding: Protect programs with clear revenue linkages. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - Reading level: Flesch-Kincaid Grade ~8–9 (estimate). #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Lists; clear structure. - Improve: Pipeline/funnel/ARR mapping diagrams. #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: N/A. - Improve: 3–5 minute audio summary. #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Analogies (language/bilingual). - Improve: Glossary of business terms. #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: N/A. - Improve: Build-a-report exercises with sample data. #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: Stepwise argument. - Improve: - Summary: DevRel teams struggle to prove value because they lack business literacy. Learn why understanding sales, marketing, and finance is foundational to DevRel success. - URL: https://dev.to/mattstratton/why-business-literacy-matters-for-devrel-and-why-you-cant-skip-this-step-30p1 I hear over and over again, "the business doesn't understand DevRel." I'm here to tell you that is backwards - the problem is that DevRel doesn't understand business. Look, I get it. You didn't get into DevRel to spend your days talking about pipeline contribution and EBITDA. You got into this because you genuinely care about developers, you love building communities, and somewhere deep in your soul, you believe that if you make developers' lives better, good things will happen for everyone. And you're not wrong. Well, mostly not wrong. But here's some tough love for you, from me: if you can't translate that work into language that resonates with the folks who control the budget, you're going to have a really hard time getting to do that work at all. #### The Uncomfortable Truth About DevRel Right Now It's rough out there for DevRel teams. I've watched talented people get laid off. I've seen entire DevRel orgs dismantled. I've had conversations with DevRel leaders who are fighting for their team's survival. What's the common thread that I see again and again? They couldn't effectively communicate their value to the business. And I want to be really clear about something before we go any further. This isn't about "selling out." This isn't about abandoning your principles or becoming a shill for marketing. This is about learning to speak a second language so you can advocate more effectively for the work you believe in. I mean, if you're a Developer Advocate who only speaks English, and your CFO only speaks French, you're not going to get very far by just speaking English louder. You need to learn some French. Or at least enough French to explain why your conference budget isn't a waste of money. #### The Problem: You're Playing a Different Game Than Everyone Else All the time, I see DevRel teams out there doing amazing work. They're building thriving communities, creating killer content, supporting developers through real problems. They're measuring engagement, tracking sentiment, monitoring their community health. And then budget season comes around and people start asking questions like: * "How does this impact our ARR?" * "What's the cost per lead for these activities?" * "How much pipeline did DevRel source last quarter?" And the DevRel team responds with things like: * "Well, we had 50,000 impressions on that blog post..." * "Our Discord community grew by 30%..." * "Developers really love when we do office hours..." You know what happens next? Crickets. Blank stares. Nothing gets approved. This is the disconnect. You're speaking different languages. And the frustrating part is that your work DOES have business impact. You're just not articulating it in terms that land with the people making decisions. You don't understand the APIs of the rest of your company. #### Why "Just Prove Your Value" Isn't Helpful Advice If you've been in this space for more than five minutes, you've probably heard some variation of "DevRel needs to prove its value." And there are approximately one million blog posts out there about metrics and attribution and ROI frameworks for DevRel. None of this is helpful for you without tattooing this on your eyeballs: you can't effectively measure and demonstrate your value if you don't understand the fundamentals of how the business actually works. All those fancy attribution models and measurement frameworks are less than useless if you don't know what ARR means, why finance cares about the difference between CapEx and OpEx, or how marketing thinks about funnel stages. It's like trying to optimize your database queries before you understand how indexes work. Sure, you can learn about advanced caching strategies all day long, but if you don't understand the fundamentals, you're just guessing. #### The Real Goal: Becoming Bilingual I'm not saying you should become a mini-marketer or a sales shadow. You're still a DevRel professional. Your primary job is still to serve and advocate for developers. For a second though, think about how amazing it would be if you could: * Walk into a meeting with your VP of Sales and have a meaningful conversation about how DevRel activities are accelerating deals in the pipeline * Sit down with your CFO and explain your budget in terms that make sense to them, using language they actually use * Talk to your CMO about how DevRel's activities map to different funnel stages and why that matters * Advocate for your team's budget and headcount in terms that resonate with executives That's what business literacy gets you. It's a translation layer that lets you bridge the gap between the technical community work you do and the commercial realities of the company you work for. And yes, I said "commercial realities." Because unless you work at a non-profit (and even then, maybe), your company exists to make money. DevRel is part of that. You can have feelings about capitalism all you want, but if you want to keep doing DevRel work, you need to understand this. #### What This Series Will (And Won't) Cover Over the next few posts, I'm going to walk you through the fundamentals of three key business functions: 1. **Sales** - What your sales team actually does, how they measure success, and where DevRel fits in 2. **Marketing** - How marketing thinks about the world, what they care about, and why DevRel isn't the same thing (but needs to speak their language) 3. **Finance** - The basics of budgets, P&Ls, and why your CFO cares about things you've never thought about And then we'll also dig into what Product-Led Growth is, and why it is such a nice complement to DevRel. What I'm NOT going to cover in this series: * Specific DevRel metrics or KPIs * Attribution models * ROI calculation frameworks * How to build a business case for DevRel Why? Because those things are the next level. You need the foundation first. And that foundation is understanding how the core functions of your business work. Get smart about that, and then get into the implementation details. #### The Payoff Here's what you can do once you develop this business literacy: **You can advocate more effectively.** When you understand what matters to your stakeholders, you can frame your work in ways that resonate with them. You're not compromising your values; you're translating them. **You can align better.** When you understand the company's business objectives, you can intentionally align your DevRel strategy and activities to support them. This makes you more strategic, not less authentic. **You can fight for your team.** When budget cuts are coming, the teams that can articulate their value in business terms are the ones that survive. Full stop. **You can build better partnerships.** Understanding how sales and marketing work means you can collaborate with them more effectively, which amplifies your impact. Look, I spent years as a sales engineer before I moved into DevRel and community work. I've sat in sales pipeline reviews. I've defended budgets to finance teams. I've worked with marketing on campaigns. And I'm here to tell you that learning to speak the language of business didn't make me a worse developer advocate. It made me a more effective one. #### One More Thing Before we dive into the specifics in the next posts, I want to get this out of the way. Some of you are probably thinking "but DevRel isn't sales" or "we're not marketing" or "we serve developers, not the business." And you're right. DevRel is its own discipline. But DevRel exists within companies that have to generate revenue to survive. And unless you're independently wealthy and running a DevRel program as a hobby, you need to understand how your company makes money and how your work connects to that. The best part about "selling out"? You get paid. And you get to keep doing the work you love. So let's get started. In the next post (coming soon! Give me a minute!), we'll tackle Sales 101 - what your sales team actually does all day, and why understanding their world will make you better at yours. #### What's Your Take? Have you struggled to communicate DevRel value to non-technical stakeholders? What's been your biggest challenge? Drop a comment - I'd love to hear your stories., Why Business Literacy Matters for DevRel, Matty Stratton, 01k8kne05ttaw3yv49wf549exc.