Slack has taken up the services of Bear Douglas to lead the company’s developer advocacy group. She joins the company from the same position at Twitter. Earlier, she had also worked at Facebook in a similar capacity. Douglas is expected to prove a significant asset to Slack and help the company build relationships with third-party developers.
Upon joining Slack, Douglas tweeted:
Excited to be joining @SlackHQ today, working on dev platform with the awesome @ashevat, Aaunder and crew! Can’t wait to get started.
As the head of developer advocacy group, Douglas will be working to increase engagement between Slack and third party developers. Her role will also involve encouraging developers not associated with the company to build applications that use or offer support for Slack. There is a considerable scope for this kind of role and it is actually pretty important too — once you stop to consider the fact that over 66 million applications support Slack.
Considering that she has worked at both Facebook and Twitter, Douglas is well suited for the jobs and will bring a lot of experience to the table.
Douglas left Twitter back in November and since then, relationship between the platform and developers have been steadily deteriorating. Douglas’s departure was preceeded by similar exits from Twitter’s head of developer relations Jeff Sandquist, senior developer advocate Romain Huet (who joined Stripe) and senior director of developer and platform relations Prashant Sridharan (who went to Segment).
What’s more, the company recently sold of its Fabric mobile developer platform — one of the strongest links connecting the company to the external developer community — to Google.
Twitter has reiterated its commitment to developers. However, with continuous exits, the company first needs to improve its relationship with its own team.
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.
