Mentoring: Leading the Future  ## Metadata - Author: [[Community Pulse]] - Full Title: Mentoring: Leading the Future - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/15d406ee-6e93-4cf5-bae1-ada1f0fc8957 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **DevRel Needs Mentorship More** - Developer Relations (DevRel) lacks mature resources like schools and formal programs compared to other tech roles. - It varies greatly across companies, making mentoring essential for sharing evolving best practices. Transcript: Speaker 5 Part of the road of being better at develop relations is applying what we've learned, passing that knowledge onto others. Whether you're a direct mentor or lead a team of folks new to DevRel, it's important to take stock of what we're doing and how we can best help serve people and pass on the knowledge that We have. Speaker 6 You're listening to the Community Pulse Podcast. Speaker 2 Welcome your host, Mary Thankball, Jason Hand, PJ Haggerty, and Wesley Faulkner. Yeah, so welcome everybody to another episode of the Community Pulse. My name is Jason and we've got some great guests and of course PJ and Wesley are here with me today. But to give us some insight on mentoring in the DevRel space, we found a couple of folks who have been teaching community leaders how to be their best for a while. With us, we've got Rosie Sherry and Tessa Creasel. Rosie, Tessa, say hello and Rosie wants you to share a little bit about yourself. Speaker 3 Hi, yeah, thank you for having me. I'm Rosie Sherry. I live in the UK and Brighton. I am married with five kids. I'm also found off Rosie Land, which is, I guess what I would call, a creator project where I write about community, show about community and teach about community. And I'm also found a stroke CEO of Ministry of Testing, which is what I would call a community of practice for support testers. So I head that up. I started that back in 2007. I took a break recently, but I've recently come back to the role of CEO. Great. Thanks for being here and Tessa, how about you? Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm happy to be here, especially with Rosie, big, big fan of Rosie. She's an awesome human being. So my name is Tessa Creasel. I am a head of platform developer relations over at Snap. I am technically on the AR side, so we're under the Snap AR brand and not necessarily under the Snapchat app brand. But it's still all the fun goodness of the really fun camera technology over there. I have been in DevRel for, I would say eight or nine years now, and also run a website, I hope it's about tons of time on, but do continue to put some content on over at learndevrel.com as I try to do what I can to mentor and share the knowledge that I do have. Speaker 4 Awesome. And as Jason said, thank you so much both of you for being here. We've got a bunch of questions for you, but I think that in some ways, developer relations is a little bit different than a lot of other jobs, where it's kind of a learn from those who know Why is mentoring so important to DevRel particularly as opposed to maybe some other positions, especially in tech. And either of you can jump in whenever you're ready. Speaker 1 I can jump in. I think that, you know, like, similar to what Rosie is doing over on Rosie, is like curating a lot of really amazing content to help people understand like what it's like to be in the role And to do the role and to drive success to that role. And I think that when we think about other industries like say, marketing, right, or like product management or sales in tech, they all have fundamental programs behind them or multiple Pieces of content or materials, or even sometimes there's like schools, right, similar to code schools or boot camps, that are in a lot of those other industries. And when it comes to DevRel, we just don't have that like maturity level, I feel like, although DevRel has been around for many, many, many years, especially according to Apple and, You know, the OG days in that way. I just don't think we have the resources for folks to get and learn everything that they need to know to dive into this sort of career. And then I think the other thing that's probably going to open up like a big conversation with up here at UThinkRoze is that it is so different for each company and for each person, right? So coming into a DevRel role and moving to another one is never exactly the same. And so I think that makes it even more difficult with the lack of resources and then, you know, with the ever-changing landscape ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/31f1a175-5bb6-465c-bbac-ee561e669db6)) - **Community as Your Mentor** - Avoid relying on one formal mentor; learn from your whole community. - Everyone around you can be a mentor by teaching you various lessons. Transcript: Speaker 3 Not really, but I think at the same time, anyone can be my mentor. I guess it's like, how do you define what a mentor is? It's like someone who supports you, right? I think we can fall into the trap of a mentor has to be someone that you look up to. Someone who's a head of you, often too far ahead of you. It's a trap that people fall into, especially like an influencer world. People tend to want, they kind of get tagged on or grab onto the people that are popular at the time. That's dangerous, but I like the aspect of the community is your mentor. The people who surround you are your mentors and everyone can teach you something. We shouldn't try to tag ourselves onto the more successful people or the more experienced or. Even things like trying to be better human beings, trying to build a better world, trying to act with ethics, trying to be more diverse, trying to get rid of the old school ways of doing Things. To do that, we really have to speak to our people and understand the stories that they have to share. That almost empowers us to create change in the things that we do. I guess that's what I do. I speak to like, I guess as CEO of Ministry of Testing, I'm down there with people every day just chatting away and trying to learn from them, trying to understand what their position Is. Are they not my mentors? No, but I learn from them and I discover stuff. That's how I approach it because I think every time I've tried to think of a mentor, it just feels almost too overwhelming to go through a formal process of, or would it be my mentor? It's just never worked ([Time 0:06:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c4894ce-e46e-48af-a04b-c6f5225496ea)) - **Use Flexible Mentorship Sources** - Tailor mentorship to your current needs by seeking situational advice from multiple sources. - Use mentors for specific skills like leadership or sales as needed. Transcript: Speaker 1 Yeah, super great question. Similar sentiment to Rosie in some ways. I try to, depending on the situation, reach out to someone who is in the industry, someone who has recently been talking about it, maybe someone who has recently wrote a piece of content That relates to maybe what I'm working on. I would say that my mentorship in terms of me having a mentor is definitely very flexible, so similar also to you, Wesley, and that I do have a mentor and someone that I consider to be a mentor Who he is a product leader. He's been in the space for a very long time. He is of an older age than myself, and so he's someone that I go to to just be like, hey, here's what I want to do. What do you think? He's going to check me on the validity of my idea, the validity of what I'm doing, am I capable? In all the right ways, just a really good cheerleader in that way. That person is very helpful to me. I don't tap into and utilize that person as much as I should, and I think that probably brings up a really good conversation here of there's probably a bigger opportunity for all of us To tap into this and to have more mentors, but outside of that, it's very situational. I recently just asked my manager, I'm like, hey, teach me something, you're a sales chops. I am naturally good at sales, and I know we're talking about deferrals, so everyone's going to freak out, so it's exactly why I said this. Because I'm in a role where sales matters, and I'm managing partnerships of developers, and so I need to understand some of the sales funnel things that are happening behind the scenes So that I can relate that back to the work that I'm doing and understand which individuals are actually someone that we might take to a sales process. So long story short, it's very situational. I do have a really good friend that I always go to when it's something big. Speaker 2 Yeah, and I want to jump in with a thought that going back to what Rosie said is, well, and really what you were just saying ([Time 0:09:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/47f5e139-5b93-49bb-bda2-8cb5c3b1875f)) - **Broaden Mentorship Focus** - Mentorship doesn’t have to be purely DevRel-focused; life and business mentors enhance your overall effectiveness. - At advanced levels, peer mentoring and review are often more impactful for day-to-day DevRel work. Transcript: Speaker 2 It may be, but it's not always DevRel. Does anybody really have any thoughts around does it have to be specific to DevRel for us? Should we make that the priority? Or are we actually in a better place to kind of have mentorship from a larger scope? And I don't know, it will start with Sherry on that question? Speaker 3 Makes it up as much as possible. To a certain extent, I guess, I like having a variety in different perspectives, different viewpoints. I think one thing to be mindful of is what is the boundary of that? Because sometimes people give advice with good intention, and in worldview it's good advice, but if you follow things blindly, actually some advice is really bad advice. If they don't have enough context about your situation. And I've seen that happen, I guess a friend of mine was advised by a big startup guy on how to do things. But the context was so different because he was being advised by someone who worked at Google, yet this person was at a bootstrap company. It was a totally different ball game. But it completely threw this friend of mine. But he looked up to him as a mentor, and he ended up going down a completely different track. I guess that's a danger of things. It's like you want diversity, but you also want to make sure that people understand where you're coming from and not to get the wrong kind of advice. I definitely agree with that. Speaker 1 So the way that I look at it is I have like three different areas. One of them is a completely personal girl. How do I just be a better human being period? And oftentimes my mentors are not people who are in tech or not people who are in a similar industry is me very similar to what you said Jason. The second bucket is business. What can I learn about business? What can I learn about anything related to business? Whether it be tech or non-tech, I do feel like that strengthens my skills in dev rel when I can better understand businesses fundamentally. And then I think that the third part would be sort of that dev rel space, like what I actually do in my day-to-day job. And I find myself not necessarily like with our mentor because similar to what Wesley said, when you reach a certain point, there are not a lot of folks that are above or beyond where I Might be at. There are definitely people who have been doing it longer, and I for sure look up to those people. But it's more of like a peer review type of a thing. And so I've got a really great group of peers who I'm like, hey, here's how I'm like thinking about measuring success here. Or here's my strategic vision. What do ([Time 0:12:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1dcf4533-3677-4efa-92dd-d0a85d1f99fb)) - **Mentoring From Unexpected Places** - Jason Hand used stand-up comedians and his musician background to improve DevRel speaking skills. - Performance skills from other domains helped make his technical talks engaging. Transcript: Speaker 4 Advice or leadership or mentorship outside of the realm that you understand. I know that when I first started doing dev rel, which back then the technology we had was like the wheel and stones and fire. We had to share with that and other people because I'm old. But in all seriousness, like one of the things that that I got a lot of compliments on when I first started was when I gave speaking engagements, it was really good at speaking engagements Because that was something that I had tried and oddly there I had two mentors for that. The one was stand up comedians. We talked about that shows the rule of threes, making sure you always have three parts to a presentation, making sure that you're taking the stage that you're commanding the stage, You're bringing the audience in that the levity doesn't override the message, things like that. But the other mentor I had and this is gonna sound so not humble, so stand by be ready was me. I had been a musician my whole life and there was so much I was informed of and had learned from mentors in that realm about performance, about how to put on a show, which is really what when You give a speaking engagement what it is. And if you think about when you're streaming, it's a performance when you're doing YouTube, when you're doing a podcast, it's a performance. There's a certain pacing you have to do a certain cadence you have to hit, there's points you have to make, there's Wesley putting a quip in right at the right time, a little brief story That moves the conversation along. These things are all super important. But at the same time when it came to starting DevRelate back in 2017, my biggest advisors were people who were like startup people who were like, listen, I know you're trying to do a startup Based around DevRel, it's just a thing, bootstrap the damn thing, don't look for, don't give your dreams away, don't sell them. And that actually worked out better for me in the long run. So finding something, someone outside of your short circle, but also relying on people you know you can trust, I think is a key to finding a good mentor. And Rosie, I know you had something, something to add there. ([Time 0:17:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/335b349b-b683-442d-b9c5-dab14d5f89db)) - **Seek Context-Aware Mentors** - Find mentors who understand your personal context, like being a parent, to get relevant advice. - Avoid advice that doesn’t fit your unique life and work balance. Transcript: Speaker 3 Woman in tech, a mother in tech or a mother and five kids in tech. I've switched off from so much of the advice out there, it's just like not applicable. Unlike the advice that a lot of guys put out specifically, I'm just like, you don't know how easy you have it sometimes. And it's stuff like you see like tweets on social about, there was one that I put out a few weeks back where a guy brags about sleeping on the floor in the office and this is how hard his life Was. Speaker 4 And then they call that hustle porn stuff. Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like you know, most of the time I ignore it, but sometimes I put out my own version. So I put my own version of like me having three kids in my arms, like and then I mentioned something like this, this is how I'm running my business. So it's understandable that like so much advice out there does not apply to me because like I literally not entirely, but like a lot of my business was built from my phone because I was Out and about with my kids a lot doing stuff on social answering emails, breastfeeding my child, couldn't quite get my, do my work on my laptop. So I got an iPad and I got my phone and that was my way of kind of getting stuff done, delegating stuff because I couldn't sit in front of the computer for long enough to do certain things. That's how I had to design my life. So ([Time 0:19:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/105b8c9f-1fc3-4f04-a7cf-5c49031664fc)) - **Mentoring Broadens Perspectives** - Mentoring opens you to new ideas and perspectives beyond your comfort zone. - Helping others empowers you and leads to unexpected growth and opportunities. Transcript: Speaker 2 The things that might not be so obvious around benefits of being a mentor, mentee situation. Speaker 5 Does Rose-Ewen start with that one? Speaker 3 Yeah, benefits. I think it opens your world to new things, new ideas. Any time I speak to someone in a mentoring way, I just think like it makes me think about other things and it almost makes me see things and see how I might be able to apply them to my life as Well. And just trying to help people is also really, I don't know the right word, it's just like the right thing to do. It's empowering. It leads you places that you never know where you're going to end up, right? There's a quote from Steve Jobs that I remember a lot because he says to say, you can't connect the dots looking forward, you have to connect the dots looking backwards. And he said that in relation to how he dropped out of university and dropped into a calligraphy class and how that ended up being what inspired him with the Mac. So of course he couldn't plan that, but he had gone down these paths and he'd learned different things along the way, but it's only in hindsight that he could connect the dots. And I just think in life, it's important to do those kind of things and step outside of your comfort zone, try to help people. And yeah, I think as mentors, we think like we're given to them, but other people are also given to us through that process. Yeah, that's totally agree. Speaker 2 And ([Time 0:23:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6acd97ed-67b7-47ea-a4a7-79aa8cece6ec)) - **Mentorship Strengthens Hiring** - Mentoring fuels hiring pipelines by letting leaders evaluate and recruit candidates they've guided. - Mentorship builds a trusted network beneficial for team growth and referrals. Transcript: Speaker 1 Right? Because you're able to ask someone how to do something, what you should consider in your career, whatever it is, right, that you're working through. And you know, and those benefits can be, like I said, knowledge, it can be networking, right? Like they can help you find another job, they can help connect you to different things. You can, you know, find a following through your mentor, right? Like, who do they follow? Who do they follow on social who follows them, right? There's just like this whole big circle around why you want to have a mentor. And then there's the other side, right? There's like the as a mentor side. And as a mentor side, like one of the things that I think is really, really hard to do in DevRel as a leader, and unfortunately the economic situation has maybe made this easier, which Is a really, truly sad, but it's hiring. It is very hard to find the right candidate for the right job inside of developer relations. And I have felt that the major benefits to being a mentor on that on this side is actually to have that network of folks that you've been mentoring. Every single person that I have hired in any DevRel capacity, where I was a leader bringing folks onto my team, where people that I have the chance of mentoring in the past, right, I helped Them, I guided them, I got to watch them flourish, see what they were up to, watch their career, understand how they think. And then through that, right, be able to pick people that I think are going to be the right people for the roles that I might be looking for. Or on top of that, refer them to fellow DevRel leaders who need someone of the capacity that I mentored. So I could go on and on and on, and this ([Time 0:26:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1e809867-4db5-4d3d-bbac-2ddab9b8df74)) - **Ethics Over Profit: Casey Newton** - Casey Newton left Substack due to ethical concerns about platform alignment with extremist groups. - He chose Ghost, an open-source platform, to uphold his moral principles. Transcript: Speaker 5 That theme. Speaker 4 If she's cross-breeding moose, we have bigger problems. We need to have a conversation. Yeah, yes. Speaker 5 One thing that I wanted to highlight, also on the mentoring front, is that when 2008, I switched roles from being an engineer into social media, and Sarah Vella, orchid 8, was my mentor Who helped shep her through that. And that whole process really reinforced my hope and humanity that someone was willing to take care of me and to help me and to help me transition into something that was new to me at the Time. And my link is also something that really helps me reaffirm my faith and humanity. The tell of it is why platformer is leaving Substack. And this was Casey Newton's podcast, sorry, not podcast newsletter, that was on Substack. And then he tried really hard for them to really make a hard stance on saying, are we for or against Nazis and said to say that they came out in favor of Nazis? And so he decided to transition his whole newsletter and his platform for platform onto Ghost, an open source platform, because he was just saying, like, I'm going to stand by my principles. And he also earlier did the same thing with Twitter and to mass it on. And he's a really big grand at this point. And him not only just writing commentary on what's going on in tech, but actually making moral judgments of how he's going to choose to move his platform and where he's going to be sending Readers and making a conscious choice. So that I thought that was like a really good story in tech about how the moral choice wins out over the financial one. And so that's that's why ([Time 0:34:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8287382c-8436-4653-a217-9fe9716aec91))