What is an evangelist? To me, an evangelist is someone who will be an outward face for a company’s products. They go and preach its strengths with passion and fervor. They honestly believe in the product’s awesomeness, and are willing to help do what they can to make it better.
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What is an advocate? An advocate is someone who listens to their community. Their role is not to preach the wonders of the product, but instead listen to what the community is looking for and communicate that back to the teams that can work on that.
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Simply put, evangelists tell and advocates listen.
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I’ve never seen a company or product that has been 100% perfect. It feels... dishonest to me, personally, when I try to tell someone about the strengths without also mentioning the weaknesses.
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Others are really good at looking at the upside. At being optimists. I’m definitely jelly of them.
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I spend most of my time looking at the downside when it comes to products, since *that* is where I can be impactful. It’s hard for me to turn that off. When it comes to work, I end up a pessimist.
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The not-doom-and-gloom reason I feel like I’m an advocate rather than an evangelist is that I love listening to people’s pain and trying to identify solutions that solve multiple problems once implemented.
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Listening to tens or hundreds of people’s struggles with engineering and development is super interesting because it allows you to spot patterns. Those patterns generally have an underlying, shared source. That source can often be solved, which will have a branching effect.
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Being an advocate means I can be at conferences, I can be in meetings, I can be in open-source. It means I get to live and breathe your problems, and try to help solve them. I think that’s pretty nifty.
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The one challenge I often face: people thing I’m trying to tell them how awesome a product is. They think I’m evangelizing.
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I’m not. I honestly want to learn what would improve *your* experience, regardless of whether or not you use the product. If there’s something painful for you, it’s probably painful for everyone. It’s also software; it’s almost certainly a problem we can fix.
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As an advocate, I get to help share what’s painful and try to help remedy that pain for developers.
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Since I was a teen, what I’ve cared about more than anything in terms of engineering was making things easier for other developers. Being an advocate is the realization of that.
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