The first known example is when Guy Kawasaki was invited to a small company called Apple to be a software evangelist in 1983. The first Macintosh was released the following year. The rest is history…
While this role is often viewed as fictitious or irrelevant, if the Developer Evangelist does his job well, by engaging in the work process he can make a huge difference in the work environment within the company and impact the products that go to market.
Many companies are attempting to reconcile the different processes in their business by using an “intermediary,” who has sufficient knowledge and understanding for the programming and design process and is able to communicate this process effectively from start to finish, delivering the product.
What Is the Role of a Developer Evangelist?
As they say from their own experience, many developer evangelists have found themselves communicating through blogs, webinars in which they convey the company’s message about the culture of a team of engineers.
Simply communicating through social networks such as Twitter, you can read about experiences within a particular company and share information between developers and management.
To be able to communicate successfully with those who have an interest in selling a product, they must be experts in their way – when it comes to a particular product.
Their job consists of:
- attending events and/or meetings,
- communicating with your web app development team,
- product management, and sometimes they find themselves
- working on the product themselves.
Development advocates can also recommend educational and support materials on digital technologies, like ebooks on cybersecurity or various media materials like YouTube videos which can be useful.
However, evangelists with coding experience do hold a lot of value to companies, because they can offer suggestions for improvements to the development team, or can improve the performance of services.
They continue to develop, but they do it on examples, training materials, tutorials rather than on products.
Among the areas where you can become a more effective developer evangelist are:
- Writing tutorials in code
- Blogs
- Public speaking
- Create a podcast or stream
- Support the community of developers through various activities
Soft Skills – Communication to Other Members of the Team
What was neglected in the previous period and today has become a valuable skill: empathy is one of the qualities of a developer evangelist that helps him achieve results in his work:
- Sensitivity depends on the person and especially helps those who have enough experience to help others as mentors and guide them on the path to their roles.
- They are not necessarily the most experienced in the team, but they have the most empathy and openness to the questions of other team members.
- Patience is certainly a virtue that should adorn every development evangelist since he works with different types of teams, which are made up of people of different characters and levels of knowledge or experience.
Ability to Grow the Network of Associates and Colleagues
Developer Evangelists don’t deal with sales or marketing, but they must understand the whole process. The key feature is that they are:
- a team member who has enough experience in the business, as well as
- an understanding of the process from the beginning until the end,
- to be able to influence and connect all teams with his authority,
- emphasizing the importance of coding, development, and presentation to management.
Who is the Evangelist Developer and What do They do?
Product Development
One of the first conditions to do a good job is to know the work process. A good prerequisite is if the evangelist developer were themselves a programmer, engineer, or working on product development in the previous period.
Maybe that job still works, but they have sensitivity to communication and empathy, understanding for colleagues in the team, and can overcome any problems in creating products and achieve good results that bring benefits to both parties.
If you find a successful developer evangelist, you have brought the company into a win-win situation, since both employees and management benefit from it, and your work environment has a person at the center of the process.
Persuasive communication, feedback, and message exchange
The exchange of information between different teams in the company is crucial. In this way, the developer advocates are crucial because they can influence management to make an informed decision before the product hits the market.
The role of evangelists is also to serve as a direct line of communication to avoid customers of a particular company’s product and production team, as they convey customer reviews, decision points that lead to a reaction or, ultimately, a purchase.
Development of the Teams and Continuous Education
Switching to the “new normal” has taught us all to be constantly vigilant and use the opportunity to continue learning. It is a special obligation for developer evangelists to continue their education, as well as the advancement of other team members.
The development of teams in every sense is one of the priority tasks since their stagnation can`t improve the quality of work, and technology and market demands do not suffer from stagnation but require constant improvement in the amount of knowledge.
First among equals should be the development advocate in the sense that they must undergo training and continuously improve to know what to recommend and how to organize teams.
Organizational skills of the developer evangelist here come to the forefront, mediation between developers and engineers on the one hand and creatives in the areas of marketing and sales, on the other:
- The ability to recognize the risks that may arise at each stage of product development,
- the ability to offer solutions to a particular problem,
- networking, and
- communication between teams to reach the final product,
are one of the important things that development evangelists deal with.
Improvement of Work Processes and Management of Operations
From the classic hierarchy and delegation of responsibilities “from the top” to the “bottom” of the decision-making ladder, in the previous period, we began to introduce and get used to new work processes and more importantly, management of operations.
Whether it is NLP, agile management or something else, each of these work processes carries a novelty with it. And the novelties in the work bring new results. Which is a change.
Developer evangelists must have the ability to share the news so it can be used to improve the business in the company in which they work.
Because of the breadth of the image they can see and the communication with different teams that can be technical and non-technical, these persons are the right ones for the job.
Does Your Company Need a Developer Evangelist?
Although small companies strive for quality when hiring developers, large developed companies that have multiple teams and levels must maintain a certain level of quality that will seem appealing enough to quality developers to come and stay there.
Developer evangelists are the ones who mediates the communication between different teams, keeps the developers in focus by:
- organizing different meetups,
- a hackathon,
- pointing out the importance of the products that consumers buy.
As well, it is the developer advocate who mediates between the desires of development teams and senior executives who hope to earn and get results. The job is neither easy nor simple, but there is someone to do it.
Are You a Company That Is Ready to Hire an Evangelist Developer?
The IT world is growing and teams on different sides of the process see more and more opportunities and opportunities to work. On the one hand, developers are getting more and more requests for product development, whether it is a website or an application.
On the other side, marketing departments and customer services receive feedback on any issues that may be causing the issues.
Developer evangelists who speak both languages work from here. They must be able to recognize the shortcomings of the application and correct them, while also highlighting the options that can bring profits to the organization, while always being aware of the complaints of users and eager to respond to them.
Because of this, large companies hire development advocates to stay desirable for developers and all networking opportunities. The text gives the reasons why the idea of hiring developers is good. But the final decision is up to you.
