DevRel KPIs

Metrics and methods for proving ROI through data + story. Advice from around the DevRel and Community world.

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Made by the team at Orbit.

Reference

Compare customers that are engaged in the community versus customers that are not across pipeline, ACV (Annual Contract Value), product adoption, and attrition.

Erica Kuhl

Erica Kuhl

CEO & Founder of Erica Kuhl Consulting, Former VP Community at Salesforce

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Reference

The rate of repeat questions in the support channels decreasing over time or number of articles created.

Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith

Venture Partner at OpenView.

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Wisdom

DevRel Qualified Leads are connections passed along to the right team in hopes that together, they will be able to accomplish a task that furthers the overarching company goals.

Mary Thengvall

Mary Thengvall

DevRel director @Camunda and author of The Business Value of Developer Relations

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Reference

Member-generated content index: amount of content produced by the community, weighted by length/depth.

Josh Dzielak

Josh Dzielak

the developer advocate's advocate · co-founder / CTO @OrbitModel · formerly @algolia and @keen_io · Ruby · Rails · JAMstack · he/him

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Reference

One way to demonstrate the impact of community activities is by calculating Natural Rate of Growth (NRG) and showing how community and DevRel contribute. NRG = 100 x Annual Growth Rate x % Organic Signups X % ARR from Products

Patrick Woods

Patrick Woods

Writer, fencer, and co-founder and CEO of Orbit

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Reference

Time to First Hello World (TTFHW): The longer a developer takes to get started with your platform, the less likely they will be successful.

Derric Gilling

Derric Gilling

CEO @MoesifHQ and API Engineer

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Wisdom

Measuring everything is only slightly better than measuring nothing. Pick one KPI and do it well.

Matt Broberg

Matt Broberg

open source community storyteller @Opensourceway

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Wisdom

DevRel cannot be held responsible for the final outcome, whether that is a guest post, a partnership, a new hire or a converted customer. The value DevRel delivers is the connection itself—the opportunity for marketing or product or sales or another team to transform the DevRel qualified lead into a valuable business asset. That’s what you have to measure.

Mary Thengvall

Mary Thengvall

DevRel director @Camunda and author of The Business Value of Developer Relations

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Wisdom

Having community insights at hand in GitHub issues and PRs is a great way to direct my open source efforts to new and/or inexperienced contributors, improving their contributing experience.

Nicolas Goutay

Nicolas Goutay

Software Engineer, Orbit

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Reference

Measuring the traffic to your developer portal (e.g. page views) is an important way to get a sense of how to be more effective at creating developer-friendly docs.

Jaime Lopez Jr

Jaime Lopez Jr

Developer Advocate at Jack Henry & Associates

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Wisdom

You can't measure that which you don't record. One of the most valuable lessons I've learned about developer advocacy, or devrel in general, is that tracking the work you do is fundamental to your success.

Kurt Kemple

Kurt Kemple

DX Consultant | Developer Relations Manager, Apollo

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Reference

Measuring the number of community members responding to other members' support questions is a great way to understand how your devrel efforts are building a solid community of self-sufficient members

Bolaji Ayodeji

Bolaji Ayodeji

Software Engineer, Content Creator, and Developer Advocate at Commerce Layer

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Reference

Number of pull requests submitted, open, and accepted (and length of time they remain open).

TODO Group

TODO Group

The professional open source program networking group at The Linux Foundation

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Reference

The number of high-value leads (actively engaged open-sorcerers) contributing to your open source projects sometimes trumps high-volume leads. It is an excellent #DevRel KPI metric.

Ahmad Awais

Ahmad Awais

Award-winning DevRel & Google Developers Expert.

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Wisdom

For the most part, goals fall into one of three broad categories: awareness, revenue and developer experience.

Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith

Venture Partner at OpenView.

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Reference

Arm share: 'Raise your hand if you're heard of X' (count the number of arms you see)

Josh Dzielak

Josh Dzielak

the developer advocate's advocate · co-founder / CTO @OrbitModel · formerly @algolia and @keen_io · Ruby · Rails · JAMstack · he/him

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Wisdom

I think using metrics as a way to inform the trend is good. Using them as the only method of success leads you to trouble.

Joe Beda

Joe Beda

Principal Engineer at @VMware

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Reference

Compare customers that are engaged in the community versus customers that are not across pipeline, ACV (Annual Contract Value), product adoption, and attrition.

Erica Kuhl

Erica Kuhl

CEO & Founder of Erica Kuhl Consulting, Former VP Community at Salesforce

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Wisdom

At JFrog, measuring face-to-face comes back to how well it feeds into online activity. “The first goal is to bring people online because from there we can actually measure.“

Baruch Sadogursky

Baruch Sadogursky

Head of DevOps Advocacy at JFrog

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Wisdom

Revenue is a natural second-order effect of high gravity. With communities, as gravity increases, more users will end up in the adoption funnel.

Patrick Woods

Patrick Woods

Writer, fencer, and co-founder and CEO of Orbit

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Wisdom

You don’t need everything you do to build community to be tied to revenue.

It’s okay to do things just to build the community and trust that the value will show up in ways you can’t measure.

In fact, it’s a requirement in order to build real community.

David Spinks

David Spinks

Founder of @cmx, VP Community @bevylabs

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Wisdom

KPIs make sense when you have a set of action points that depend on the numbers you get - here's a fable of what happens when a manager asks for KPIs just because they need something.

Alyss Noland

Alyss Noland

Senior Developer Advocate at Box

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Wisdom

If the metrics change and you don't, stop measuring it. If you're not taking action in response to the metric going up or down (or qualitative getting better or worse), then you shouldn't be measuring it. You're wasting effort, and other functions will be more aware than you think.

Kurt Kemple

Kurt Kemple

DX Consultant | Developer Relations Manager, Apollo

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Reference

Number of sales calls attended when technical members of the prospect need to learn more about the technical aspects of the product.

Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith

Venture Partner at OpenView.

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Reference

Signup-to-Active ratio.

Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith

Venture Partner at OpenView.

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Reference

Community managers should track the Love and Reach of their community as well as the distribution of Orbit levels, and the change in each over time.

Patrick Woods

Patrick Woods

Writer, fencer, and co-founder and CEO of Orbit

Track with Orbit ››

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Reference

Community activation: what % of product users join the community?

Josh Dzielak

Josh Dzielak

the developer advocate's advocate · co-founder / CTO @OrbitModel · formerly @algolia and @keen_io · Ruby · Rails · JAMstack · he/him

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Reference

Weekly Active API Tokens: The mere act of generating an API key does not measure usage since even non-developers can view API keys without any real use for them. Since most APIs limit access to authenticated users, we are able to track how many distinct tokens are accessing our API platform on a given week.

Derric Gilling

Derric Gilling

CEO @MoesifHQ and API Engineer

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Reference

Number of unanswered questions / answered, weekly or monthly.

Channy Yun

Channy Yun

Principal Tech Evangelist @AWSKorea. Cloud, Open API, Open Source, Web Standards

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Reference

I believe that how many developers did we help is a very good way to measure success.

Max Katz

Max Katz

Program Director, Developer Advocacy, @ibmdeveloper / @ibm

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Wisdom

The mission of a developer relations team following the orbit model is to facilitate high-quality word-of-mouth exchanges.

Josh Dzielak

Josh Dzielak

the developer advocate's advocate · co-founder / CTO @OrbitModel · formerly @algolia and @keen_io · Ruby · Rails · JAMstack · he/him

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Wisdom

Developer marketing KPIs and DevRel KPIs are different. According to our survey, the top 2 DevRel KPIs were: 1. Registered developers accounts (48%) 2. Developer satisfaction score (48%).

On the other hand, the top 2 KPIs for developer marketing were: 1. Page or video views (55%) 2. Unique visitors or IP addresses (54%)

View the full results in the source below.

Stathis Georgakopoulos

Stathis Georgakopoulos

Marketing & Under The Hood of Developer Marketing Podcast Host @SlashDataHQ

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Wisdom

Don't measure that which is already counted. If you try to use metrics that are already owned by another team/function, then you run the risk of: 1) competing against a team you should be impacting, 2) never being able to produce the same results as a team dedicated to that metric, and 3) Doing the same work that another function already does well.

Kurt Kemple

Kurt Kemple

DX Consultant | Developer Relations Manager, Apollo

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Wisdom

Not all metrics are equally trusted. It turns out, the more degrees of separation between your metric and your company's north start metric (generally revenue related), the less likely it is to be trusted. Just because you show a report doesn't mean others trust the associated impact on the business. Sometimes you have to build trust in your metrics.

Kurt Kemple

Kurt Kemple

DX Consultant | Developer Relations Manager, Apollo

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