Telling my leaders that I want to be a dev advocate and the challenge of creating my own role - #DAJ 6

As you read in the title, I said to my leaders that I want to be a developer advocate, and I have two answers: Woo, that's amazing, we need that; and the other one, what is that? What are you going to do?

In my current company, I know that we need this advocacy, but for me was a little tricky because in the other companies, the role was already defined, and they know the precise actions the developer advocate needs to do. In my case, I need to do my homework, research and understand our products and how the developers interact with them. It was an enriching experience, I love it, and I hope it makes me a better dev advocate.

Obviously, it's not about me; well, at first, it wasn't so obvious; It's about the product we provide and how I can make it easier to use, thinking in what the current users of our product need. So now I have more clarity about my proposal to my leaders, and I will have a short meeting with the product manager and the tech lead of the engineering team in charge to line up our ideas and make something valuable.

I really wish my colleagues would love our product.

I think my advocacy will be to my coworkers. Later, I can make more noise about our product to the community using the same technology and inspire others to use more open source projects. For now, I tell you, being a dev advocate is not doing what you want; it's doing what devs need; my first mistake was not understanding that.

Let's give value! 💜