Consultancy workflows for Developer Advocates

Learn about the Developer Advocacy team’s consultancy workflows and requests.

Teams and divisions can request consultancy in areas where Developer Advocates are Subject Matter Experts (SME), or can help with their experience or connection network.

Organization

Consultancy requests are labelled using the DA-Consulting:: scoped labels, with the DA-Type::Consulting label as pre-filtered list.

Request developer advocate consultancy

Important: Verify that the request requires help from the Developer Advocacy team before requesting consultancy. In most cases, the Solution and Demo Architects teams are the first to ask for help.

Developer Advocates and requestors can use the consultancy-request issue template.

Decision matrix

  1. ARR (and influenced ARR for SKUs)
  2. Aligned with company direction and Developer Relations strategy (for example, a specific Vertical in the quarter).
  3. Expertise and resources. If developer advocates cannot deliver on a specific programming language/framework, or do not have the resources to prepare for consultancy, we will deny the request and suggest alternative DRIs on the SA/CSM/Engineering teams.

Consultancy areas

There is a wide variety of areas and topics that can be requested. It is important for Developer Advocates that requests align with their expertise and resources, and are not too broad, or without success exit criteria. All consultancy requests should be turned into opportunities to repurpose the learnings or created resources into more content.

Generally, all product areas, features and technology can be requested. The sections below document a few recent examples of requests and their results.

GitLab Duo / AI Adoption

Goal: Help customers adopt GitLab Duo and AI-powered DevSecOps workflows.

Developer Advocates are encouraged to help with

  • (Live) programming workshops, when fluent and confident in the requested language together with GitLab Duo.
  • Code challenges for customer engineering teams to test GitLab Duo.
  • GitLab UI and IDE setup and troubleshooting.
  • Latest product updates and improvements.
  • Best practice resources, demos, product tours, and use cases (see content library)
  • Support field teams in Slack (#ai-field-strategy, #ai-sme-request, #ai-field-technical).

Collaboration for customer workshops is important. Solution Architects lead the Proof of Value (PoV) workshops for GitLab Duo and AI. They get help building the workshop outline from the SA Demo Architects and Customer Success Management team. Developer Advocates are encouraged to help with programming workshops, IDE setup and troubleshooting, and generally sharing best practices as a developer with customer’s (engineering) teams.

Customer feedback can inspire bug reports, feature proposals, documentation updates, blog tutorials, demo stories and much more. Make sure to always listen and take notes during customer engagements.

Customer adoption engagement examples are available in the FY25Q2 OKR KR, the GitLab Duo (AI) Adoption FY25 (DevRel) epic and this pre-filtered issue list.

Results:

SME DRI: @dnsmichi

MLOps Adoption

Goal: Enable data scientists and MLOps engineers to adopt DevSecOps practices and enjoy the benefits of automation, repeatable workflows, standardization, and automatic provisioning of infrastructure.

Recent customer workshop examples are available in this pre-filtered issue list (internal).

SME DRI: @warias

Last modified August 9, 2024: Dev Advocacy: Add Consultancy handbook, including requests and examples: Duo Adoption (e9e2bdaf)
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