Not too long ago @KhanAbbas201 wrote about the quiet decline of DevRel role.
This year, I have deprecated @buildstationorg for the same reason, DevRel responsibilities have shifted. Similar to Abbas, I also think DevRel is suited to transition to Growth (role shift) or EcoRel (expanded role). Having both sales and technical skills are valuable within crypto.
I speculate the following changes depending on the project:
- For Ethereum and L2s, the new DevRel would assume a more prominent public builder role, experimenting with the latest trends onchain. This also makes sense as L2s becoming more specialized to compete. It's now important to showcase what's new to developers rather than passively wait for external developers to try. A great example is @austingriffith and his @clawdbotatg.
- For Applications/Protocols, the new DevRel would focus on building complimentary products and services based on the stack, serving as inspirations for others to build and create new revenue streams/partners. Check out @gregskril and his free NFT tax loss harvesting tool.
- For Toolings project, the new DevRel would become the power user of the tool, continuously finding new use cases, embedding the tool in new applications (created by them or someone else). @FUCORY built a high performance Ethereum library for typescript, then included the lib in his latest vibecoded Ethereum execution client.
There are many more examples so feel free to explore more on X.