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Something i feel isn't easy to discuss are the possible downsides and tradeoffs of the job. As someone not in the "core product team" of the company its easy to feel left out of the cool kids club. We all want to make cool new things. I have had to constantly remind myself that my value is not best expressed in building stuff in private and in closed source, and its ok to not be involved at every stage of every product initiative in the company.

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This is a very real problem, and one I learned to deal with for the just under two years I was in evangelism. It was a big shift from 'doing the doing' to trying to influence the doers (product, engineering) from the outside. What I learned though was that I had a unique perspective into customer's needs since I was a partner to them and not trying to sell them anything (thankfully the company backed up this philosophy). Once I learned how valuable that perspective was, I was able to use those learnings to get leverage with the product team to effect change. So while it was a few degrees away from writing the code to make a customer's life easier directly, ultimately I got the same satisfaction from being the customer's advocate. And it made it possible to transition to a PM role.

Not being on the product or engineering team can definitely be a challenge. What I learned at Algolia is that it's critical to build trust between engineering and dev relations. Dev rel needs engineering to be engaged in community initiaves (and to help code stuff) and product/engineering can get great feedback from dev advocates working in the field about the real developer experience :)

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