The Relationship Between Dev Relations And Support

I saw an interesting chasm emerge while at a Google Community Summit this last week, while I heard their support team talk, as well as their developer relations team discuss what they were up to. During the discussion, one of the companies presents discussed how their overall experience with the developer relations team has been amazing, their experience with support has widely been a pretty bad experience--revealing a potential gap between the two teams.

This is a pretty common gap I've seen with many other API platforms. The developer relations team is all about getting the word out, and encouraging platform usage and support teams are there to be the front line for support and being the buffer between integration, and platform engineering teams. I've been the person in the role as the evangelist when there is a bug in an API, and I'm at the mercy of an already overloaded engineering team, and QA staff, before anything gets resolved--this is a difficult position to be in.

How wide this chasm becomes ultimately depends on how much of a priority the API is for an engineering team, and how overloaded they are. I've worked on projects where this chasm is pretty wide, taking days, even weeks to get bugs fixed. I'm guessing this is something a more DevOps focused approach to the API life cycle might help with, where an API developer relations and support team have more access to making changes and fixing bugs--something that has to be pretty difficult to deal with at Google scale.

Anyways, I thought the potential chasm between developer relations and support was worthy enough to discuss and include in my research. It is something we all should be considering no matter how big or small our operations are. There is no quicker way to kill the morale of your API developer relations and support teams by allowing a canyon like this to persist. What challenges have you experienced when it comes to getting support from your API provider? Or inversely, what challenges have you faced supporting your APIs or executing on your developer outreach strategy? I'm curious if other folks are feeling this same pain.