You can find some information about how we do Developer Relations at Meilisearch: the foundation of devrel (3Cs), our lean startup approach and the list of activities we do.
The three pillars of Developer Relations are Community, Content, and Code, also known as the 3Cs*. The main focus of our team is the community: just read our mission to understand that everything we do is for our community. To help us achieve our mission, we use two main activities: content and code. The former is any type of content on any useful medium; some examples are talks at conferences, documentation, or video tutorials. The latter, code, is part of the foundation of who we are: we are developers. It translates into code examples for the documentation, code demos for our conference presentations, technical support, or even being responsible for specific APIs or contributing to open source to give back to the community and be a good web citizen. All together, they form the foundation of developer relations.
* adapted from SendGrid 2014 article
We believe that plans should never be set in stone: they are a lighthouse guiding us in the right direction. We make plans to ensure that we are focusing in the right direction and maximizing our efforts where we can have the greatest impact.
Our process will always be “lean startup” style.
We will update our yearly planning and tasks based on the KPI we will gather while working on them. If we are not successful, even with all the focus work done, we will take the time to evaluate our processes. We can go as far as modifying the yearly goal to adapt to how our industry and community is responding to our efforts.
We are using a priority system for our tasks and goals based on the MoSCoW method.
P0 - Urgent P1 - Must have P2 - Should have P3 - Could have P4 - Will not have
Priority P0 is for urgent things needed on our team or another team needing our help. They are the reactive mode tasks. In a perfect world, those would-be situations created by external factors as we should plan better on our side.
Priority P1 is for non-negotiable tasks that will help us achieve our goals with the maximum impact. Those are the tasks, when planned for a quarter, that should be done by the next one.
Priority P2 is for important initiatives that may not bring as much value to the team than the P1. It includes things we should do that won’t directly help us achieve our goals, but needed to move in the right direction. A P2 can become P1 when they are critical for the business or are prerequisites for another P1 (i.e.: changing the documentation framework—we need it to manage different versions of Meilisearch after v1, but it has no direct impact on our goals).
Priority P3 is for nice to have initiatives: they have a small impact, and are mostly done when we have the time.
Priority P4 have a misleading title: will not have is mostly about our team. They are the tasks or initiatives that are not a priority and don’t bring much value, still they could be nice. If they are really short to do, it could be a task we do to change our mind between more important ones, but in most cases, they are tasks open for anyone else to take.
Here is an exhaustive list of developer relations activity categories. We are taking activities that could be managed by a marketing or social media team for now.
- Writing blog posts for Meilisearch or as a guest elsewhere
- Managing external writers, whether volunteers or paid freelancers
- Helping contributors and reviewing code-related PRs
- Helping contributors and reviewing documentation-related PRs
- Writing documentation
- Resolving documentation-related issues and maintaining the repository
- Creating demo applications using Meilisearch
- Creating helpful code snippets
- Creating example datasets
- Discourse Support
- Slack Support
- Running hackathon contests and mentoring participants
- Writing and sending the newsletter
- Participating in external audio podcasts or running the official Meilisearch podcast, if we create one
- Speaking at conferences, including creating slides & demos
- Organizing and speaking at meetups, including creating slides & demos
- Ensuring a healthy and active Discord community
- Posting, commenting, and replying on social media accounts
- Speaking to tech media on behalf of the company
- Participating in or creating our own vidcasts, live streams, and other video-based content (such as tutorials)
- Managing a digital volunteer program (equivalent to Microsoft MVP, Google Experts, etc....)