DevRel Is Not Measured Like Other Roles — And That Needs to Change
Over the past year, I’ve had a recurring conversations with developer advocates at different companies, different stages, different products. The details change. The frustration doesn’t. They feel like they’re being evaluated by a rulebook that was written for a different role entirely. I’ve written before about why DevRel is worth every penny you invest in them and the identity crisis that plagues the role. But there’s a more specific problem underneath both of those — one that I haven’t seen addressed directly: the measurement standard applied to developer advocacy is unlike any other role in the company.
After sitting with this long enough, I think I understand why. Developer advocacy is the only role in a technology company that gets held accountable for both what it produces and what it causes. At the same time. With no agreed model for connecting the two.
I want to explore four things in this blog:
- The specific double standard DevRel faces that engineering and sales do not.
- Why the “attribution is hard” excuse cuts both ways — and how to actually solve it.
- The community bias baked into most DevRel measurement frameworks — and the enterprise dimension that gets ignored entirely.
- What a fair measurement framework looks like when it’s aligned to where the business actually is.
Output and outcome are not the same thing
When a software engineer wraps up a quarter, the evaluation is grounded in what they shipped. Features delivered. Systems built. Problems closed. At senior levels there is some expectation of broader impact, but that impact is always traced back to something the engineer directly controlled — a decision they made, a system they designed, code they wrote. The chain is short.
When a sales professional misses quota, no one asks them how many prospecting emails they sent. The output is the outcome. You either closed the business or you didn’t.
Now look at what happens when a developer advocate sits down for a performance review. The manager wants to know how many blogs they published, how many conference talks they gave, how many demos they built. That is the output layer. Then, in the same conversation, the question shifts: what was the business impact? Did developers adopt the product? Can you show community growth? Did your work influence pipeline?
Two layers of accountability. One role. Product managers sometimes navigate a similar tension, but they operate with agreed frameworks — roadmaps, OKRs, delivery milestones — that connect their work to outcomes. No other individual contributor role faces this combination without an agreed model for connecting the two, and almost no one talks about it openly.
“Attribution is hard for other roles too” — and why that argument misses the point
When developer advocates raise the attribution problem, the pushback is usually some version of: “Marketing has attribution problems. Internal tooling has attribution problems. That doesn’t mean you get a free pass.”
It’s worth addressing that directly. That is a fair point. It doesn’t mean DevRel gets a free pass. But it also ignores the real issue.
Marketing has attribution problems — and Marketing has MQL/SQL models, CAC tracking, and campaign attribution tools that the whole organization has agreed to use. The proxies are imperfect. They are accepted. Everyone knows before the quarter starts what counts and how it gets measured.
Developer advocacy has the same attribution problem as marketing with none of the agreed proxies. In that vacuum, managers either count outputs — blogs, talks, demos — and use those as productivity scores, or they skip directly to business outcomes and hold DevRel responsible for numbers they have no direct line to. Neither is measurement. Both are unfair.
The solution is not to exempt DevRel from accountability. It is to build the proxies that the industry has failed to standardize. They are not complicated:
- How many developers discovered the product through DevRel content, talks, or community work?
- Of those, how many completed a first meaningful integration?
- How is community health trending — contributor growth, forum resolution rates, developer sentiment?
- How many developer pain points surfaced by DevRel actually made it into the product roadmap?
- What is DevRel’s share of voice in the technical communities where the target developer persona lives?
These metrics are measurable. The industry has just not committed to measuring them.
The community bias nobody talks about
Most DevRel measurement frameworks were built by people who came up through open source and community-led growth. That made sense for the companies that pioneered DevRel — HashiCorp, Twilio, Stripe — where the community motion was the primary path to adoption. Measure community health, measure developer acquisition, measure activation. The model fit the motion.
But a significant portion of developer-first companies today are not selling through community-led growth. They are selling to enterprises. The developers they need to reach are embedded inside engineering teams at large organizations, evaluating tools under procurement timelines, with security reviews and architecture approvals standing between a positive developer experience and a closed deal.
For those companies, DevRel’s most impactful work looks nothing like conference talks and Discord engagement. It’s running a technical workshop with three engineers at a shortlisted enterprise account. It’s being pulled into a pre-sales call because the solutions engineer needs someone who can answer hard infrastructure questions credibly. It’s writing the integration guide that unblocks a deal that has been stalled for two months. It’s sitting in a post-sales call, translating a customer’s frustration into a structured product feedback report that actually reaches the roadmap.
None of that work shows up in community metrics. And when leadership sees flat community numbers alongside a healthy enterprise pipeline, they draw the wrong conclusion about what DevRel is contributing.
The fix is the same as the broader measurement problem: match the metrics to the mandate. For enterprise-focused DevRel, the right metrics look closer to sales engineering outcomes — deals influenced, time-to-integration reduced, technical blockers resolved in the sales cycle, customer retention tied to technical enablement. Holding an enterprise-focused DevRel team to community metrics is not just inaccurate. It is measuring the wrong game entirely.
The right measurement depends on what stage you’re in
This is where most companies get it completely wrong. They hire a DevRel team and immediately apply the metrics they’d use at scale — pipeline influence, community size, developer NPS — to a team that’s still figuring out who their developer persona is.
The right measurement framework depends entirely on where the business is:
Pre-PMF: The most valuable thing DevRel can do is get structured, honest feedback from real developers back to the product team. Measuring them on community size at this stage is not just useless — it actively incentivizes the wrong behavior.
Growth: Developer acquisition is the goal. Activation metrics and top-of-funnel developer growth are the right indicators. How many developers are discovering the product? How many are moving from awareness to first use?
Scale: The question shifts to ecosystem health. Are external developers contributing? Is the community self-sustaining? Is developer NPS moving in the right direction?
Enterprise: Trust and credibility in the market become the currency. Presence at tier-1 conferences, technical content authority, deals influenced, and recognition from developer opinion leaders matter here in ways they don’t at earlier stages.
Applying scale-stage metrics to a growth-stage team is not a measurement problem. It is a strategic misalignment that gets misdiagnosed as a DevRel performance problem.
You cannot hold a team accountable for outcomes they cannot influence
This is the part of the conversation that most organizations avoid. I touched on this in the context of the Principal Developer Advocate role — where influence is broad but authority is narrow. The measurement problem is the same dynamic, just one level up.
If a developer advocate is responsible for developer adoption, they need real influence over the developer experience — not a ticket queue where their feedback competes with a hundred other priorities. They need access to activation data and developer NPS scores, not just the ability to ask for them. They need a seat in roadmap discussions before decisions are made, not a chance to react afterward. They need budget to invest in the communities and programs that move the numbers they’re being judged on.
I have watched companies eliminate DevRel programs because the ROI wasn’t visible — right after spending two years denying that team the access, authority, and tools that would have made the ROI visible. That is not a DevRel failure. That is an organizational failure that DevRel gets blamed for.
The measurement problem in developer advocacy is not that the work is unmeasurable. It is that the industry settled for lazy measurement — counting outputs when convenient, attributing outcomes when something goes wrong, defaulting to community proxies regardless of what the business actually needs — and never built the honest framework that the role deserves.
If you run a developer-first company and you have a DevRel team, you have a straightforward choice. Define the stage you are in. Agree on the proxies that match that stage and that motion — community-led or enterprise. Give the team the authority to actually move those numbers. Then hold them to that standard — the same standard you would apply to any other function.
Fix the measurement or fix the mandate. Continuing to do neither is a choice too, and your best DevRel people already know it.
