# [[Measuring the impact of Developer Advocacy]] ![[Measuring the impact of Developer Advocacy.svg]] It's difficult to measure the impact of [[Developer Relations|Developer Advocacy]] because of its intentional avoidance of tactics that directly relate to conversions (ie, purchases or signups), preventing them from being measured like marketers. DevRels often command higher salaries than pure content creators, so they also can't be measured as if they were pure content creators. However, the large cost of most DevRel departments means that DevRel performance must still be measured to some degree. ## What to measure What we _want_ to measure is quality over quantity of reach, and depth over breadth. Matt Makai suggests we pay attention to metrics at different levels: input, output, financial, and business. [^makai] ### Input metrics Input metrics are metrics regarding what was actually done. Input metrics are most relevant to [[Individual Contributor|ICs]] and their immediate team, and are often the most immediate way to judge their productivity because all the other metrics are [[Lag indicator|lag indicators]]. ### Output metrics Output metrics represent the outcome of the work that was put in. They are typically important at a departmental level because they represent work done by more than one person or team. #### [[Monthly Active Developers]] Shawn Wang has proposed a metric called "Monthly Active Developers". [^swyx] ![[monthly-active-developers.png]] [^swyx] Shawn further breaks down the this metric according to the [[Developer Relations#Pillars of Advocacy|pillars of Developer Advocacy]]. ![[Measuring Developer Relations#^d43217]] ##### Community ![[Measuring Developer Relations#^629ba8]] [^swyx] ##### Content ![[Measuring Developer Relations#^82273c]] [^swyx] I do question, however, the inclusion of conferences in content-- I would include that under Community. ##### Product ![[Measuring Developer Relations#^52c041]] [^swyx] ### Financial metrics Financial metrics represent the bottom line dollar amount of how well the company is doing. These metrics are most important to management and executives, but are also more difficult to tie back to specific DevRel activities because they're the result of the contribution of multiple departments. ### Progress towards business objectives Business objectives are grand plans for the company set at the management/executive level, and progress towards them can be tracked to get a bird's eye view of the health of the company. However, like financial metrics, they're also difficult to attribute to concrete DevRel initiatives. ## Bad metrics for DevRels What *shouldn't* we use as measures of our success? - GitHub stars on repos created for demo purposes - Traffic that uses a UTM campaign tag placed on social media links ## Tools - [[Matt Makai]] created a tool called [Plushcap](https://www.plushcap.com/) that measures community/output metrics of many tech companies. He uses automated scrapers to get the information and then [[Large Language Model|LLMs]] to summarise insights. [^makai]: Makai, M. (2024). *Measuring DevRel progress.* Talk given at DevRelCon 2024 in New York. 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(2021). _Measuring developer relations._ Retrieved from https://www.swyx.io/measuring-devrel/ . [[Measuring Developer Relations]]