Scaling Trust: Lessons from a Decade in DevRel

Maria Chen spent the first half of her career building products. The second
half, she says, has been about building trust the slower, less glamorous
work of making a developer community believe you’ll still be there in five
years.

In this conversation, Maria walks through the early Stripe DevRel playbook,
the year a community nearly fell apart over a broken changelog promise, and
why she now treats documentation debt the same way engineering treats
technical debt: as a line item, not an afterthought.

She also talks candidly about the habits that don’t show up in a highlight
reel the boring, repeated small acts that compound into something a
community actually trusts.