Developer Advocacy

Welcome to the Developer Advocacy Handbook

QuickLinks

Team Workflow

Issue Templates

• New Content Issue
• New Event Issue
• New Activity Issue
• CFP Issue Template

Issue Boards

• Team Workflow
• Content by Assignee
• Content by Quarter
• Content by Types
• Events

Team Resources

• Team Calendar
• Content Effectiveness
• Team Projects
• OSS Contributions
• Action Template for Announcement Responses
• CFPs
• Content creation
• Team Shared Drive

Want to work with the team?

• Learn about Developer Advocacy

• Request a Developer Advocate Issue Template

• Request Community Response support

• Request Content

Mission

To support, grow, and engage the wider GitLab community through collaboration, content, and conversations.

Strategy

Developer relations and developer advocacy is an evolving, complex field.

Our team focuses on areas aligning with the company’s areas of interest including:

• DevSecOps: We want our work to speak to not only developers but all team members involved in the DevSecOps lifecycle to deliver working code to production: Product Managers, software engineers, system and DB administrators, designers, test engineers, security engineers, operations engineers, platform engineers, SREs, development managers and executives, etc.
• Enterprise: Developers and DevSecOps professionals in the enterprise have special constraints and needs. Often these are glossed over with easy “throw out your architecture and use this new shiny thing” - we won’t do that, we’ll acknowledge real-world challenges, legacy code, and enterprise constraints and help people solve those problems as well. When applicable, we switch roles into consulting and support.

KPIs

The FY25 Marketing Strategy (internal only) shows a Customer Journey with five stages: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, Expansion, and Evangelism.

While our team can influence people at each stage, our key focus is on Awareness, Consideration, and Evangelism. The KPIs we use to measure our impact on these stages are:

• views from content published across owned and earned channels
• developers engaged through webinars, workshops, and industry events

We also look at Developer Relations influenced pipeline and active community members as performance indicators.

We recognize these KPIs don’t capture the impact of the diverse range of work that our team does but understand that tradeoffs can be necessary to effectively communicate our impact within GitLab.

OKRs

• OKR list

What fits in our strategy

When we are reviewing opportunities or requests for support, we must be able to answer yes to each of these questions to move forward with the work:

1. Will this work support, grow, and/or engage GitLab customers and community members?
2. Is there a measurable impact against one of our team’s KPIs? Because of GitLab’s global optimization subvalue, we’ll also consider requests that influence a company KPI or contribute to progress on an OKR.
3. Has an issue been created to define the work and assign a DRI?

If the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, we ask the requestor to take one of the following actions:

1. Make adjustments so we can take on the work.
2. Find another team that is better suited to deliver the work.
3. Come to an agreement that the work should not be done.

Team members and focus areas

We are members of the Developer Relations team.

What we do

Our developer advocate team can be summarized by the “Three Cs”:

1. Content creation: This is what many often think of when thinking of the traditional role of developer relations: writing blog posts, delivering technical talks, participating in podcasts or panels, and sharing ideas and thoughts on social media. Content creation also includes assets co-created with other GitLab teams, inside and outside of Marketing.
2. Customer and community engagement: Our team regularly engages with GitLab customers and the wider GitLab community when they have questions, concerns, and feedback. This happens during in-person and virtual events, webinars, and meetings and online via GitLab issues, the GitLab Forum, Hacker News, and other social media sites.
3. Consulting: Within GitLab, our team represents the voice of the community. When other teams are working on changes or decisions that will impact customers and the community, we will educate them on our customers and community, advocate for their interests, and work to ensure that any potential impacts are clearly understood and addressed when communicating such changes. Our team also shares our knowledge of industry trends, emerging tools, social media strategy, and other skills to support our teammates in achieving their goals in alignment with GitLab’s Cross-functiona Optimization subvalue.

Content creation

We build out content to help educate developers around best practices related to DevOps, GitLab, remote work, and other topics where we have expertise. Content includes presentations, demos, workshops, blog posts, and media engagements. Content creation also includes assets co-created with other GitLab teams, inside and outside of Marketing.

Please read the Content handbook to learn more about the content workflow, library and distribution with UTM tracking.

Customer and Community Engagement

Our team regularly engages with GitLab customers and the wider GitLab community. The Developer Advocate team is the DRI for questions and strategy on the platforms below:

Community Response

Given the Developer Advocate team’s understanding of our community and broad knowledge of GitLab, we will engage in the response of situations that require intervention to address urgent and important concerns of our community members. We have a documented process for how we manage these situations.

Consulting

Developer Advocates serve as consultants and subject matter experts (SMEs), leveraging their expertise and experience to support teams and customers with product features, new SKUs, and other topics.

Please read the Consultancy handbook to learn more about consultancy requests, decision matrix, and examples with GitLab Duo / AI adoption.

Other activities

Event support

The Developer Advocate team plays a key role in supporting events. We work closely alongside Corporate Event Marketing to provide strategic content and assistance for both corporate and third-party sponsored events. This collaboration ensures the success and seamless execution of various gatherings. To learn more please refer to the Events page.

We also help team members prepare for speaking opportunities at local tech events and meetups. If you’d like help preparing for such an event, please reach out to us in the #dev-advocacy-team Slack channel or create an issue using the Developer Advocate Request template.

Release Advocacy

Developer Advocates should always be prepared to promote our monthly release and engage in community response on release days given the historical performance of release posts on Hacker News.

Social media

We build our thought leadership and distribute our content on social media. See Developer Advocacy on Social Media to learn more about our strategies and become a GitLab advocate yourself.

Spokespersons

Developer Advocates are subject matter experts (SMEs) in their focus areas, and collaborate with the Corporate Communications team to provide media coverage in the form of interviews, podcasts, content by-lines, etc. Developer Advocates are GitLab spokespersons and are required to take relevant training as determined by the Corporate Communications team.

Projects

Our team maintains projects to provide GitLab use cases for content creation (demos, recordings, blog posts, workshops, talks, etc.), help showcase technical concepts and research to customers, and automate our team processes. We work in public by default, so that everyone can learn and contribute. See Developer Advocate Projects for a list of all of those projects.

How we work

Find us on Slack

GitLab team members can also reach us at any time on the #dev-advocacy-team Slack channel where we share updates, ideas, and thoughts with each other and the wider team.

We use developer-advocacy-updates for content shares and other updates that don’t warrant generating noise in the larger channel. Many updates are automated using Zapier workflows

Team meetings

1. Dev Advocacy team meeting (bi-weekly) - Agenda: search for Developer Advocacy Bi-Weekly in GDrive.
2. Developer Relations all-hands (monthly) - Agenda: search for Developer Relations & Strategy | All Hands Agenda in GDrive.
3. Dev Advocacy Showcase (monthly) - Agenda: search for Developer Advocacy Showcase [monthly] in GDrive.

Reporting

We organize our work through documented team workflows, ensuring transparency and efficiency. Most of our results reporting is automated through triage bots and metrics collection.

Additional reporting is provided in the weekly Developer Relations report, search for Developer Relations - End of Week updates in GDrive.

Calendar

The Developer Advocate calendar provides insights into speaking engagements, important events, CFP timelines, and other dates. Learn more in our CFP handbook.

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