I Am No Longer a Developer Advocate

I'm not a Developer Advocate any more...

This is a small career update. This week, I started my new role as a Product Evangelist. I had my reservations, but I want to share with you why I think this is actually a positive move for my career.

Advocates and evangelists are no different

The biggest difference for me in this role is the title and the skepticism that comes with the evangelism titles. The younger version of me would say that evangelists are more concerned with the product than they are the customers and community. Where advocacy feel like tech's social workers, evangelists feel more like televangelists or car salesman with the pomp, circumstance and ultimate salvation that comes with you believing in the company product.

I now realize that much of the advocacy vs evangelism is based on the individual, not the title. While it's true my focus is now more geared towards helping people get the most out of our PostgreSQL offering, that doesn't mean that my involvement with the community that I work in has to change.

Smaller scope means deeper focus

The biggest change in my role now is that my scope is significantly smaller. Aiven's product is vast. That's one of the reasons I wanted to join the team was to get exposure to a lot of different technologies. That said it became obvious to me that I started to figure out which ones were my favorites.

Last year, the majority of my contribution was in PostgreSQL, Opensearch, and Valkey, this came with me making projects and workshops that tailored to those products. Of those three, I was able to contribute to Valkey and learn most about PostgreSQL.

Now my job has me narrowing my scope to those products (plus a couple others), but I get to dive deeper into them. I'm expected to know a less about our streaming and platform (although I'm jealous of what my colleagues will get to learn in the process). But I see a lot of potential in the modern world of PostgreSQL. That's why I made personal decisions to invest time and energy into it by becoming a paying PGUS member, and participated in events like PGDataDay and PgDay Chi. Because of PostgreSQL's availability, scalability, and affordability, I believe that I can build things that others can replicate for their personal use and businesses can adapt and scale for their use-cases.

DevRel looks different at every company

This change from Advocate to Product Evangelist does change a lot of my day-to-day. I'm thinking about more content, more code, less team strategy and more monitoring and customer conversation. These are things that advocates should be thinking about but sometimes don't need to nearly as much due to team sizes, concerns, budgets, etc.

This is great because, as many people hate about DevRel, we often find ourselves in different companies after a few years and much of that job-hopping comes from desiring comfort in our role. I think comfort comes from familiarity and the more things I can try, the more selective I can be in the future.

This experience is also important for me as I approach the middle stages of my career. I progressed fast thanks to opportunities at companies of different sizes and levels of stability. The last 5 months I've been working as an active middle manager with some exposure of director level duties. The decision and changes made to our team were ultimately beyond my control and in the long run I'm going to be getting more insight to different functions of the company by aligning closer to one of our products. The way that I see it, I will be getting exposure that I will need in the long run as a director of DevRel or VP Product later on in my career.

Hopium or copium, we'll see

I have to admit, this wasn't my desired pathway in my career. I have actively avoided evangelist roles and even now I'm learning how I can still be an effective advocate while my career path moves in a direction that I wasn't expecting.

More than anything, I want the communities that I have advocated for my entire career to know. I'm still here and I'm still thinking about how my words and actions impact y'all more than anyone else.