Sort of. At a very surface level, yes, this is true. Having been around the block a few times, I know metrics are tricky & often incentivize the wrong things. But if you can't tie DevRel back to making $$$, it's gonna get cut. It's just a matter of time. https://twitter.com/shar1z/status/1339596338606952448

If you're in DevRel, you *should* care about sales. Get your touch points into salesforce, so the org can see how your actions affect sales, renewals, and expansions. While it may not be your primary KPI, it can save your job.

DevRel looks different in every org, so your touch points are going to be different—it could be docs, talks, workshops, or just chatting over coffee. But measuring those in aggregate (# of talks given or audience count) isn't actually that helpful.

It's easier to prove the value of DevRel when you can say things like "Prospects who talked w/ DevRel were 50% more likely to buy" or "customers who used the docs site used the product 50% more"

If you dont have data like that, when company hits a bad run & your response is, but "we gave more talks" or "our reach was bigger" w/o associating to leads/sales, people will immediately think there is no correlation btwn reach & company success... and then you get laid off.

Touch points vs aggregates is like distributed tracing/apm vs. system metrics. Prior to APM, most incident response was correlation + hoping you'd seen/experienced something similar + intuition about how systems worked & what could be wrong. APM let you see the critical path.

So in short, mind your KPIs & dont have them directly be leads/sales, but also be able to show how you directly affect those numbers.