As we start building a devops tools business, understanding the user is everything for us. Our users are developers and site reliability engineers who make the software in production, work as it should.
The important point to understand about developers is that they are very curious by nature and always trying to learn new things. They operate in a domain which is very dynamic. The tech flavor of the season changes every few years and they need to keep updating their skills to stay relevant.
Also, they smell any marketing or selling from far. You just can't "sell" to developers. Period. They will only use your product, if it makes life easier for them, saves time or peaks their curiosity. And that's where the role of developer advocates comes in.
Developer advocates help other developers learn about the product by writing blogs about it, giving demos in meetups or helping people with their use cases. They are not trying to sell anything. Rather they just want their product to be easily understood by other developers. They also play a huge role in giving user feedback to product teams.
This roles is pretty new in the Indian SaaS ecosystem. I don't think we have as much experience about it, as we have for inside sales or landing page optimization.
I have created a public twitter list, where I am adding some great dev advocates I came across on twitter. Would love suggestions on who else to add here.
Looking forward to learn more about how can we help developers be more product and do their tasks with ease.