The Developer Relations Playbook: Earning Trust and Avoiding BS with Dev Advocate Trisha Gee
Developers are one of the most valuable (and misunderstood!) audiences in tech. They’re smart, skeptical, allergic to BS, and fiercely tribal. Which makes traditional marketing… a tough sell.
So how do you communicate with developers in a way that actually works?
Launchsquad VP Chelsea Hoedl sat down with Trisha Gee , a longtime software engineer turned developer advocate who’s held roles at JetBrains, MongoDB, and now Gradle. She’s spent more than a decade navigating developer culture from the inside—and helping companies do it better.
Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
Tell us about your role. What’s the core job of a developer advocate? Developer advocacy is, at its heart, marketing. But not the traditional kind. You're trying to reach developers with information that’s genuinely useful to them, often through blog posts, talks, videos, and open-source contributions. That might mean helping them solve a real problem, or showing them how your product fits into their workflow.
The tricky part is that you need to be fluent in dev-speak. If you’re not a developer (or don’t deeply understand how they think) they’ll sniff it out immediately. So advocacy is this balancing act between technical credibility, communication skills, and, yes, some marketing instincts.
What makes developer audiences different from other groups? For starters, most devs are problem-solvers. They’re analytical, they care about logic, and they often fall into very specific “tribes”: Java, Python, front-end, DevOps, you name it. Each group has its own norms, preferences, and even values. What works for one tribe can totally miss the mark with another.
A lot of devs are also neurodivergent, which means clarity and trust really matter. They tend to value precision over polish. And while many think they aren’t “people people,” they actually have great instincts for parsing behavior and building systems that work well for humans.
Why are developers so allergic to traditional marketing? Because they can tell when it’s not authentic. If you try to disguise your messaging, or pretend you’re not selling something, they’ll shut down. But if you're upfront (i.e. “Gradle is paying me to be here and yes, I’ll mention our product”) they respect that. It’s not about avoiding marketing; it’s about being honest about what it is, and showing where the value lies.
What kind of content or thought leadership do they actually want? There are two lanes. One is trend coverage: helping devs make sense of fast-moving topics like AI. A lot of developers feel like they’re falling behind, so if you can give them a quick, trustworthy TL;DR on what matters and why, that’s gold.
The other is evergreen pain points. Things like flaky tests, code quality, and automation. Not sexy, but deeply important. And while it may only resonate with a handful of developers at any given company, those people are often the ones driving real change internally.
Where are developers spending time? It depends on age and tribe. In my experience:
There’s no one-size-fits-all channel. But know this: if you’re targeting enterprise Java developers, TikTok probably isn’t it.
Can companies work with influential devs through paid engagements? Definitely, as long as it's transparent. Many dev influencers either work full-time at a company (so their content is brand-tied) or they’re independent and monetizing through courses, books, or consulting. Sponsored content works when it’s clearly marked and still adds value. You can do paid partnerships—just don’t hide the fact that they’re paid.
How do you measure success in developer advocacy? Honestly? It’s really hard. Advocacy often has a long tail. You give a talk in 2015, and someone buys your product in 2020 because of it. That’s impossible to track.
You can measure surface metrics like sentiment, blog traffic, video views or newsletter signups, but if you don’t have a clear goal (awareness vs. adoption vs. brand building), those numbers don’t mean much. Advocacy works best when the goal is defined upfront and the team has decided to make the investment in these communities.
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The bottom line that we learned from Trish? You can’t fake your way into developer trust. But if you meet them with clarity, curiosity, and actual value, they’ll meet you halfway.
What we’re reading:
The latest study from MIT’s Media Lab has been making headlines, looking at how our brains react when we consistently rely on AI tools for writing and related work. The research suggests that longterm usage of language models can actually hinder development and critical thinking skills. As public relations practitioners that are increasingly leaning on tools like ChatGPT in our workflows, it’s an important study to consider, especially as we onboard and train people new to the workforce.
A recent report from the Digital Forensic Research Lab examined how fact-checking and misinformation is experienced on social media when users frequently turn to an AI companion for verification of images and news. Examining over 130,000 posts on X, the study found that the social media platform’s native AI chatbot, Grok, consistently struggled with fact-checking and often provided inaccurate and contradictory information regarding the conflict between Israel and Iran when prompting.
The study puts forth a unique and comprehensive look at the limitations of AI today in providing reliable information during a crisis and spotlights the potential for Grok and other chatbots to spread misinformation.
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