Slack is adding more talent to its developer advocacy group, bringing on board Bear Douglas to lead the effort. Previously, she served in the same capacity while at Facebook and at Twitter, so her expertise in building relationships with third-party developers will come in handy for a company that’s been expanding its reach into the enterprise as of late.
The move reunites Douglas with April Underwood, the former director of product at Twitter and now plays an important role within Slack. As the developer advocate lead, Douglas will be a liaison between the company and third-party developers, encouraging and supporting them to build on top of the team chat and productivity app. At last count, there were more than 6 million apps that have support Slack.
Having someone like Douglas on board highlights Slack’s interest in the developer community — after all, a lot of the interest in organizations comes through this audience. Her experience at two large tech companies could provide Slack with insights on the good and bad ways to interact with the community and help it scale.
Douglas left Twitter in November, but her departure likely only exacerbated developers’ concern about building on the product. Since 2015, the company had been working to rebuild its relationship with the community — Jack Dorsey even issued a public apology for how Twitter treated them — but there’s been a trend of developer advocates leaving. After just 18 months on the job, the company’s head of developer relations Jeff Sandquist left, only to be followed by senior developer advocate Romain Huet who joined Stripe, senior director of developer and platform relations Prashant Sridharan going to Segment, and now Douglas.
And let’s not forget that Twitter sold its Fabric mobile developer platform to Google earlier this year. When reached for comment, a Twitter spokesperson referred us to a statement it has previously given:
“…Developers remain a strategic priority for Twitter and we are working to tighten our focus to best serve this customer set while investing in tools and services that are directly linked to our core business…”
Douglas spoke with VentureBeat soon after Twitter’s Flight conference about her role in winning developers back. At the time, she remarked what was appealing about her role was “being a part of a company that has open amounts of data is huge, but seeing a company really investing in mobile tooling” was also interesting to Douglas. She’ll likely find this same experience at Slack.
We’ve reached out to Slack for additional comment and will update if we hear back.
