Technical Evangelist – who is that?

Yesterday I have met a colleague from the improv class I took a couple of years back. He just became a Cloud Evangelist in Orange, a known telecommunication company. As excited as he was about the new job, his job description or requirements were blurry.

Step by step I kept explaining how it worked at Microsoft when I was working there and I could have noticed his face brightening up with an actual understanding. It was a pleasant feeling so it though ‘hey, I can just write about it and maybe someone else will understand!’, so here I am.

My job was focusing on promoting Azure among Developers and technical people. Another name often used for this position is Developer Relations.

There are 3 types of “Evangelists” that I recognize:

1. Broad Evangelist — a person that is working to promote the idea as widely as possible and often just encourage people to get excited and try new products/services (that was my role).
2. Deep Dive Evangelist — a person with deep technical knowledge working more closely with clients or prospects, educating teams and advising on architecture on particular projects.
3. Technical-Business Evangelist (it was called Business Development Manager back in the day, now I have no idea)- a person that understands technology more or less but his/her job is to encourage Business Decision Makers to try new products.