Introducing Ted Neward

Ted Neward’s career has spanned close to three decades, and in that time, he’s keynoted at conferences, written books and many articles, and built out a developer relations team from scratch at Smartsheet (where he worked at the time of this interview). He's now started a new role running a platform strategy team at Quicken Loans, the world’s largest mortgage lender. Over the years, he’s accumulated dozens of laptops, dozens of smartphones and tablets, a working knowledge of at least 10 programming languages and platforms, and a passing knowledge of close to 100 more. Find Ted on Twitter: @tedneward.

Geertjan Wielenga: There's this whole debate that we have about whether we are tech evangelists or developer advocates, which is a topic in itself. How should we describe ourselves?

Ted Neward: The term "evangelist" has always left a little bad taste in my mouth. So often we use the term in a negative fashion. An evangelist is seen as a zealot. Frankly, it's all of that connotation of religion.

Personally, I don't evangelize anything. A company might come to me and say, "Hey, we've got this problem and we'd like to know if Smartsheet can help." If I looked at the problem and there was really no way that my company could help, I wouldn't try to sell our particular brand of religion, because it's not a religion. There are lots of interesting tools in the world. I'd rather point companies toward a better one so that when I do recommend Smartsheet, they'll believe me.

Evangelists go around preaching and there's not that level of nuance or that intellectual authenticity. So, for that reason, we choose to use the term "developer advocate" in my company, from the standpoint that we advocate for developers not only inside the company but from the outside world. That's why we have the term "developer relations," because we're talking about how developers relate.

Developer relations is going to explode in many respects over the next decade or so. On the one hand, when you look at companies like Oracle or Microsoft, what we call "developer relations" is really just sales and marketing for them; their target markets are developers. You have to know how to talk to developers and how to meet them halfway.

Every time you go to a conference and you get a surge in downloads for your particular product, there's a very causal relationship between developer relations activity and results. Similarly, when you're a consulting company—if you're ThoughtWorks or Arthur Andersen, for example—developer relations is more of a sales activity. You're going in and you're literally proving to people that you're really smart and that they should hire your team.

For companies like Smartsheet, Netflix, Ford, and just about every other company that's out there in the world that doesn't sell to developers, they don't have that causal relationship. For Smartsheet, for example, our target user is generally a non-technical user; we don't sell to developers. Our chief executive officer (CEO) literally goes around and talks about Smartsheet as a no-code utility.

Geertjan Wielenga: How do you get the budget to go to developer conferences and why do you go to them if you don't have that direct connection?