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Olga Makhasoeva
Oli is a Director of Developer Relations & Operations with years of experience creating strong developer communities and empowering developers to build amazing things. Oli believes that community is the lifeblood of OSS-driven and SaaS businesses, and she is always looking for ways to improve the developer experience.
Even outside work, Oli's interests are to create more equitable and inclusive communities, so she studies sustainable urbanism and explores how technology could help shape better neighborhoods.
Presentations
You, my friend, are not rational and guess what? Your fellow developers aren't, either. When it comes to decision-making, our brains aim for efficiency, not perfection. As a result, even the best of us unknowingly tap into a variety of mental shortcuts and cognitive biases to speed up our decision-making.
People, including software engineers, tend to make decisions that don't always make sense, often succumbing to the biases lurking below the surface. As a developer relations professional, you can yield more influence by understanding how your customers' behaviors are influenced by cognitive biases and psychological processes that lead to better and sometimes worse decisions.
Now, you might be wondering how this knowledge can be applied in a practical sense. Let's delve a little deeper. We will explore examples of how these cognitive biases can manifest in real-world scenarios, such as instances of manipulation and negative marketing. Furthermore, we'll learn how to use cognitive biases to your benefit in your interactions with developers.
But remember, with great power comes great responsibility.
As technical experts, we love data, we love measuring our success, and we love optimizing our processes. As developer relation professionals, it's our job to make an audience as excited and fascinated about our products as we are.
So, I hopped on board a lightning-fast data streaming startup as their first DevRel hire, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I'm thrilled about the product, ready to rally the community, craft content, and measure success… piece of cake, right?
Well, within weeks, I found myself drowning in a sea of tasks, gasping for air. The questions swirled around like sharks: How do I prioritize goals? What will be the most impactful? What's a DevRel strategy for an early-stage startup, anyway? And let's not even start with what investors think DevRel success looks like (spoiler: not what you'd expect ).
In this thriller, I'll share how I relearned the essential aspects of successful DevRel programsbut from a startup's perspective.
You know, where tasks are infinite, but resources are as scarce as hen's teeth.
Don't get too scared, though. I even managed to wrangle help from engineers for content creation without driving them bonkers, and will share how with you (LLMs FTW)!