Outcomes
While DevRel teams must be beholden to company-wide top level metrics, the most important outcome for developers is 28 day active developers. The specific definition of this metric can come in a number of different ways.
This outcome can't be created directly, and is generally created through 4 sub-goals:
Happiness
Do developers like using your products? Do they enjoy coming to your events? Do they like reading your blog posts and tutorials and documentation? These questions are essential to establishing developer happiness. each can be measured independently as well as rolled up into categories.
- Product Happiness - Do they like using your products? This is the heart of developer experience and speaks to all aspects of your product and community from ease of use to documentation and support.
- Documentation Happiness - Can they find what they are looking for in your documentation? Are their searches successful?
- Document Happiness Does a specific piece of documentation meet their needs?
- Content Happiness - Do developers who watch your videos, read your blog posts, and follow your tutorials find them useful and find success through them?
- Event Happiness - When they attend your meetups and talks at conferences, do they feel inspired, motivated, and interested?
- Documentation Happiness - Can they find what they are looking for in your documentation? Are their searches successful?
Adoption
Do developer choose your product? This can be measured many ways.
- 28 Day Active Developers
- NPM Downloads
- GitHub Forks
- GitHub Projects using your product
- Transaction Volume / API Calls
Success
Success, or quality as I sometimes call it is a measure of how well developers are able to achieve their goals using your products. This can be measured in a number of ways.
- What is the retention rate of your technology?
- What's the attrition rate from building and testing to going to product (testnet to mainnet in web3)
- How many hackathon teams and projects are still around being invested in 6 months after the hackathon?
Contribution
Do folks in your community want to give back?
- How many pull requests do you get?
- How many questions are folks answering on stack overflow?
- Are folks using your products publicly and proudly?