How we'll measure performance of our DevRel activities

▶️ This article is extracted from a video transcript, slightly tweaked for better readability. Watch the original: https://youtu.be/OabGHQ133zg

Welcome to the second update of me trying to launch a DevRel program in the company I work for. Today’s topic is going to be: metrics.

So here’s the idea. Overall, right now we’re trying to launch the program. We’re doing some activities, creating content, and pretty much everything we can to start and get the wheel spinning. But on a parallel track, something else we already had to take care of is trying to answer a really simple question: okay, cool, but is this thing actually working? How can we tell if the activities or the time spent doing those are actually worth the effort?

I think today’s update is going to be around the difference between output and outcome. They might seem similar, but they’re actually two very different things.

Let’s begin with output. Output is kind of easy to measure. You can say, “Yeah, during these first six months we’ve written 10 articles, we created that amount of LinkedIn posts, we had so many views, so many interactions.” So you already have kind of a number you can put in an Excel sheet and compare. But is it actually relevant? That’s another interesting question.

How much time are we spending creating the articles? Is that a measure to know the success of the project? Well, actually, no, it’s not. It is indeed something interesting to measure and keep track of, but the goal is not to focus on the output, as I said, but on the outcome.

The idea is: okay, we wrote 10 articles, cool. What impact did those articles generate? That’s what matters. The most interesting metric we agreed on with management is lead generation. So it’s not how much time we spent or how much effort we put into creating the articles, but how many leads did the article generate? That’s a really relevant metric that measures if the project is actually working.

However, this doesn’t mean at all that the output isn’t relevant. We still want to keep track of the effort, how much time we put into creating the content, and the output: how much content we can actually generate, how many articles. I keep saying articles, but it may be webinars, it may be talks we deliver at conferences, everything has to be measured and tracked. But that’s not how we measure the success of the project. The project is measured through the outcome.

And even if we agree that outcome is what we want to measure to keep track of success, where should we put our thresholds? Like I said, lead generation, okay, awesome. How many leads do we want to take in order to consider the project successful? One? Five? Ten? And only leads? Do we want to keep track of actual customers? How many conversions do we have? Do we want 10%? 50%? 90%?

That’s also another challenge that we’re facing right now, at least in this early phase, as we hardly have any other numbers or references to use. In our case, at least for our company, it’s the first time we’re trying to do something like this. So it’s even difficult to say, “We want three leads in the next two months.” What does even three mean? Or five? Or ten or twenty?

That’s also another really interesting topic we’re just exploring. As time goes by, we might want to set some thresholds and see, in six months, how far are we from the threshold? Did we do twice that number? Did we do half that number? And even at that point, we should be smart enough to say, “Okay, we did twice our goal, was it because we were so good and we did a lot of generation? Or did we do twice our goal because we were just kind of naive and picked the wrong number, a goal that was just too easy to reach?”

Or, if we under-delivered, did we under-deliver because we didn’t create enough content? Because our content wasn’t good enough? Because it just didn’t work? Or simply because we were way too optimistic in the beginning and picked a number that was impossible to reach, and even if we did our best, we just didn’t get there?

It’s going to be fun to do this kind of analysis in the next few months, and that’s obviously another topic I want to bring here to the channel. Maybe at the beginning of next year I’m going to say, “Hey, we had this metric, this is what we reached, and this is our analysis after all the work was done.”

Wrapping up:

1. Keep track of the effort, to know how much time you’re spending doing the activity.
2. Keep track of the output, to measure your firepower, how many things you can actually do and deliver.
3. Keep track of the outcome, the results you can achieve. That is the category of metrics that will, in fact, measure the success of your program.

That’s pretty much how we think right now. I hope it’s the right direction. In any case, if you have any kind of advice about measuring developer relations activities, please let me know in the comments. As always, I’m happy to have a chat.

That’s it. That was the end of today’s video. Thanks for watching, wish me luck again, and see you in the next update. See you!