This article was developed in collaboration with Nigel Douglas, Head of Developer Relations at Edera.
One of the fundamental truths of working in tech PR is that reputation takes shape where people experience its technology. As practitioners, we have the responsibility to look beyond the obvious press coverage and into the communities we need to help our clients reach and influence.
Developers help shape that perception through their everyday experience of building and integrating software. Their influence runs through the stories we tell as a launch announcement finds its way into a GitHub discussion or a practitioner’s account of getting something to work, gathering context and scrutiny along the way. By the time a developer encounters a company’s carefully prepared message, they may already have absorbed several other versions of its story, each coloured by someone else’s experience.
PR and DevRel bring complementary instincts to that work, and some of the strongest stories I’ve worked on have taken shape through close understanding of the technology and the community conversations around it. I’ve seen this in my work alongside Nigel Douglas at Edera, whose work in developer relations has helped us connect our PR work in the realities of the developers we want to reach.
When the two work closely together, a company’s story gains both a broader audience and firmer ground beneath it.
A closer view of the developer’s world
DevRel sits close to the everyday experience of using a technology, where the promise of a product meets the realities of implementation. Its work can encompass documentation, example applications, tutorials, events and tracking conversations across forums like GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, community Slack or Discord, with insights flowing back into the product and towards developers.
The practitioners discussing a product’s limitations, architecture or operational trade-offs may also be the people journalists and analysts turn to when assessing the company behind it. A developer answering a community question can become an influential source without ever appearing on a conventional media list.
Over time, those exchanges or recurring questions build a picture of what developers understand, where they remain sceptical and which claims they are willing to test. Bringing these perspectives into communications planning gives us a much richer understanding of the audience than a set of messaging pillars can provide on its own.
Technical fluency gives a story its shape
Some of the best contributions DevRel makes to PR happen while a story is still being developed.
Consider a claim that a product makes an application “faster”. A practitioner will naturally want to understand the workload, the baseline, the configuration and the conditions under which the improvement holds. Those details influence the scope of the claim and may reveal a more interesting story about a particular bottleneck or architectural choice.
The same scrutiny applies to language around security, scalability and ease of integration. Working alongside engineering and product teams, DevRel helps assess where the evidence is strong and which explanations stand up to practitioner scrutiny.
I’ve found that understanding these angles - why an engineering team chose a particular approach, or which compromise a new capability removes - gives PR teams something more distinctive to work with.
A launch can benefit from the same relationship before the announcement reaches the press. Where early access is appropriate, developers trying the product and discussing their experience can help surface unanswered questions and probe weaknesses in the explanation. Their feedback gives the team an opportunity to refine the launch narrative and respond thoughtfully.
Reputation travels through communities
Technology PR has long organised itself around publications, exclusives, embargoes and the reach of individual outlets. Alongside those established routes, community conversations offer their own paths for reputation building. These conversations carry impressions of its technology and the people behind it into conversations and evaluations long after the original discussion has faded.
The stakes are higher when ambitious AI promises meet publicly shared experience. In July a Replit coding agent deleted a production database, prompting scrutiny of the product’s safeguards and a response from its CEO. Earlier, Meta’s Llama 4 launch drew scrutiny when practitioners highlighted that a prominent leaderboard result came from an experimental version rather than the model available to download. For communications teams, these episodes illustrate how quickly a launch narrative can acquire another layer as people share experiences and examine the evidence behind its claims.
These spaces deserve the same care we bring to PR, often through people whose job titles have little connection to the communications function. Their answers and willingness to engage become part of the company’s public reputation, whether a PR team is involved or not. DevRel’s relationships are built through that sustained contribution, and collaboration with PR needs to respect the independence and candour that sustain them.
This calls for a wider view of where communications work begins. Traditional coverage remains part of that picture, while a thoughtful response to a technical concern can give someone confidence in a company’s judgement.
That includes allowing community feedback to influence the story and the decisions behind it. When practitioners repeatedly question a claim or highlight an implementation problem, it gives the company an opportunity to improve its explanation, reconsider its positioning or take the issue back to the product team.
Another route into search and AI discovery
The relationship between these conversations and discoverability has acquired another dimension with AI drawing answers from publicly accessible forums, documentation and press coverage. Those same exchanges are reaching prospective users and buyers through the AI answers they generate, giving knowledge shared amongst developer communities a much longer shelf life.
For PR and DevRel, this becomes a reason to think about the body of evidence surrounding a company. A reported article may explain the industry context, a tutorial may demonstrate the capability, and a public technical discussion may clarify its limitations. Those materials give people, search systems and AI search tools a fully account of the technology.
In my view, this requires a more coherent approach to content, with the same well-supported claims carrying through press materials, developer resources and public conversations.
What working alongside DevRel has taught me
Years spent working in tech PR give us a deep understanding of the industries our clients operate in, but working closely with DevRel has taken that expertise further.
That came through my work with Nigel on software supply chain attacks - his practitioner-level knowledge gave us access to perspectives we may otherwise have overlooked, adding depth to commentary. From there, PR teams could connect the technical substance to a wider narrative and develop commentary with enough specificity to contribute to the coverage.
Knowing when to bring DevRel into the conversation
Bringing DevRel into communications planning can begin with a few simple questions:
· Have we involved DevRel early enough to help shape the launch?
· Do our stories reflect what the community is talking about or experiencing?
· Which claims are likely to attract scrutiny, and are we prepared to substantiate them?
· How has the community responded to similar announcements, and what can we learn from that?
· Do our claims feel overstated or out of touch with a practitioner?
A shared messaging review gives DevRel time to examine the claims, evidence and likely developer questions, while PR works through the wider relevance and clarity of the story. In our work with Nigel, that technical sense-check has been a valuable part of developing language we can stand behind. Community responses can then feed into subsequent planning, helping the team revisit assumptions as developers put the technology to use.
For developer marketers, these connections open up a more grounded way of building visibility. PR gains access to the detail and lived experience that make a narrative credible, while DevRel gains support in carrying those insights into wider conversations.
Looking at your own organisation, how often do PR and DevRel have the opportunity to shape a story together?
.png)
