devrel-team-structure

No reporting line holds a majority - the 2024 State of Developer Relations survey shows marketing 33.1%, product 21.7%, CEO 20.3%, engineering 19.9%, sales 3.2%. The Skill picks the line whose leader owns the funded driver, then names what that line starves and who covers the gap.

Start with a work inventory listing every surface with a named owner, manager, hours per week, and what breaks if it stops. Then choose a shape - centralized, hub-and-spoke, split by focus, or embedded - against staffing floors; under roughly ten full-time people, centralized is the only viable candidate.

There is no valid ratio - every circulating figure is a single-company anecdote, so the Skill refuses to quote one. Headcount is derived instead from the surface inventory, with one accountable owner plus one backup per surface, planned against at most 70% of declared capacity.

Embedded is promoted only when four conditions hold: the funded driver is product input, product lines have genuinely different audiences, each host team can fund and level the role, and a named craft owner survives outside the host teams. It is the least reversible shape and usually costs the shared ladder and calendar.

The Skill writes interlock lines rather than merging teams: one Team Topologies mode per adjacent team, what crosses the boundary, and a named arbiter. Technical writing is staffed on only 42.7% of DevRel teams, so its ownership must be declared explicitly on the coverage map.

It refuses to provide headcount ratios, compensation bands, or levelled maturity models, since no measured standards exist for them. Span-of-control checks come from general management practice only, and the ten-person shape threshold is a chosen baseline, not a published finding.