I have worked as a developer advocate at AWS for almost 4 years now. I think this article gets one half of the equation, the public facing part, but what they are missing is the second half, which is that developer advocates also serve as a bridge back from the end customers to the engineers inside your organization.

My job is to be a credible technical voice to customers, but it is also to be an accurate representation of customer needs and wants to the engineers who are building the products. I go out and do customer facing talks and live streams on Twitch, and use social media to talk about my company's products, but then I listen to these customers when they come up to talk to me after my conference talks, or when they send me messages on social media.

I take those learnings and go into product management meetings and tell the PM's about customer problems, and I write proposals for things to build to solve customer problems. I influence the customers to use my company's products and use them better, but then I also influence the product roadmap to have the right things being built for the customers, based on what they want.

So dev rel / dev advocates work in both directions. At its best it is a bidirectional channel that translates internal knowledge into external awareness, and external complaints and issues into internal awareness and solutions.