Help and Inspire. Interview with Hadi Hariri, Team Lead in Developer Advocacy at JetBrains

Help and Inspire. Interview with Hadi Hariri, Team Lead in Developer Advocacy at JetBrains
Posted on September 2, 2019 by Anastasia Kazakova

Anastasia Kazakova, our Product Marketing Manager for C++ tools, talks with Hadi Hariri, Team Lead in Developer Advocacy at JetBrains, about teaching people, helping, and inspiring them.
Hadi_Hariri

Hadi Hariri, team lead in Developer Advocacy at JetBrains

Being a developer advocate, are you closer to the users or to the product teams you are working with?

I think we’re kind of in the middle, which I believe is an important place to be for a developer advocate. We are the bridge between the product teams and users.

Okay, then being in the middle, how do you advocate developers’ needs when thousands of developers worldwide demand a feature or a bugfix, but the product team does not consider this particular need as a top priority?

I think, like anything, when you need something, you should explain the importance and value of it for folks. And this is especially relevant at JetBrains, where we don’t really have a command and control structure.

When it comes to the people who are requesting features that the product team doesn’t necessarily agree with, I try very hard to understand the vision of the product team, i.e. why not. So, I don’t say, look, there are quite a few number of people voting for this or every time I go to a conference people are talking about this, we should do this. I try again to be in the middle, move myself from the user, try to understand why the product team sees this with a lower priority, and see whether they or I may be missing some angle.