Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program

Developer Relations

Developer Relations is enabling a developer to be successful with your product while aligning with your corporate goals

3 main areas of practice

• Developer Marketing
• Developer Education
• Developer Success

The Audience: Developers

Developers like facts not marketing

Respect the differences between traditional marketing and marketing to developers. You want to inherit regular marketing practices because developers are different. Tone of voice is crucial, avoid embellishments and provide context for what the tool is and what it can do. And focus on use cases to give your developer product a chance to succeed.
— Anthony Fabbricino

Developers are creative problem solvers

• Motivations, experience, passions and types ofeducation combine to vary developer’s ability to create
• Think about what you can provide to entice developers to engage their imagination and passion with you and your product. Focused on the desired outcomes not the activities. It’s about “the art of possible” — what developers can build with your product.
• Developers aren’t highly creative, and they can’t read minds so help them by painting a picture of what’s possible and what is practical for specific industries or verticals with learning resources like use cases and showcase projects.

Learn by doing

• Professional developers are hands-on with technology every day
• They also tend to learn by doing.
• Developers want to get started and figure things out quickly. They want to be find answers quickly- they work through the night or work in different time zones to support the company they work for.

What this means as a Devrel

• showcase projects, it would be far more compelling than any marketing speech you can create.

Self-learning

What this mean as a Devrel

• You must do your research, and set expectations based on the expertise levels of your target developers.
• You need to help them learn with things like code samples, learning resources, Git hub repos, video tutorials and workshops.

Summary for this section

The goal of developer relations is about enabling developers to be successful with your product.

• Match your expectations to the experience and capabilities of your teacher audience.
• Manage developer expectations by providing the best information and learning experience based on their needs.
• Ignite their imagination to create, and then get out of their way by reducing the friction for them to get started and find financial success.
• Developers are driven by one primary emotion: the pride to know “I made that!”. Once you have helped them create something of value, celebrate their achievement.

Developers as Decision Makers

Matching Messaging to Decision Makers

Using the preceding decision-making criteria and your understanding of who the decision makers are, you can then shape your messaging, activities, and education resources to best match their interests and concerns. You can work through this by asking a series of questions about your product and decision makers:

• Who has the need for our product or understands its benefits?
  Is it the coder, is it the product manager responsible for monetization, or someone else?
  Make a clear technical and business case available to the DDMU, customized to their specific situation and context. Deliver this through customer presentations, product fact sheets, whitepapers, references in analyst research reports, case studies, example apps, etc.
• Who will implement our product?
  This could be a coder, a QA specialist, DevOps, data analyst, customer support, integration specialist, etc. To this group, emphasize ease of use and implementation through documentation, forum support, quickstart guides, and example code. Offer practical support like hosting an internal hackathon to get the company's developers hands-on with your tech.
• Who is the ultimate decision maker? Is it the individual developer, a team manager, a CTO? They need to see the summary and outcome of the business and tech cases - the combination of the why and the how.
  The following can be the most persuasive for the decision maker: testimonials, case studies, cost-benefit analysis, and quantified ROls.

Developer Experience

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