Proving your worth

Geertjan Wielenga: This is the standard problem. How do you prove to upper management that you're not a cost center or that the cost center is justified?

Patrick McFadin: I've talked about this at conferences before. The pitfall in developer relations is that we get sucked into the same kind of measurement statistics that marketing does. We start to focus on qualified leads and key performance indicators (KPIs). We start trying to calculate how many people we've talked to. That's the wrong approach; we already have a marketing department for that.

Developer relations is about awareness and the developer experience. How do you measure that? It's very difficult convincing a business that you should be measured much more like an engineering team and much less like a marketing team. What's the return on investment (ROI) on a developer building code? Give me the metrics that show the ROI. They don't exist. We hire developers to...