Articles we like.

The Iron Horse Insight: At the core of any successful developer marketing or DevRel activity is the experience itself. Beyond just providing basic materials and resources for your developer audiences, how are you facilitating the discovery and consumption of those assets? In this article Tan and Utard, discuss the secret behind Algolia’s developer program. While many facets reflect your typical dev marketing approach, Utard reveals how they focused strictly on developer needs (as opposed to business KPIs) to build a platform that truly was helpful and functional for any dev. Much like individual resources and campaigns, it’s crucial to remember that when building developer assets it’s important to “create something that is low bar (anyone can use) and high ceiling (so powerful there is never a reason to switch).”

The Iron Horse Insight: As marketers, we often preach personalization in regards to customizing outreach to resonate with potential audiences. In developer marketing, that methodology is even more important to captivate user bases. In this article by Len Shneyder, he explores the similarities between marketers and developers. He illuminates the fact that both parties share the same objective when it comes to building a relationship- attenuance and personalization of an experience is key to success. So the next time you launch a developer-focused product ask yourself, “What would *I* want out of adopting this solution?”

The Iron Horse Insight: When reviewing developer content, Iron Horse often finds a disconnect between what brands think developers want versus what developers actually need. Empathizing with developer audiences and providing functional resources is the key to success. At the core of this article, is a deep-dive into your target audiences and truly understanding what assets they are looking for at certain points in their development journey. While documentation is always good, it’s important to keep in mind that supporting content should provide an immediate solution for most developers rather than a litany of case studies and/or thought-leadership. Listening to and empathizing with your constituents is important to providing a streamlined journey and facilitating the consumption and active use of your solutions.

The Iron Horse Insight: Developer relationship (DevRel) programs are often loosely defined with more qualitative, than quantitative goals. It’s important to find a balance between the two and at a bare minimum establish some baseline in order to compare against. Aligning activities with basic business goals is crucial to continued DevRel success. As a starting point, Iron Horse often maps business goals to development milestones to understand progress and efficacy. For example, a typical DevRel goal would be community growth, with marketing looking at database growth and DevRel looking at the volume of community conversations and engagement. Developers are not typical clients/customers. DevRel success will look different than general marketing programs, thus tracking and attribution should also be customized to match the uniqueness of activities and audiences.

The Iron Horse Insight: Establishing strong developer relationships is key to successful developer programs. Advocacy is almost always the true end state and being able to genuinely connect with the developer community will yield dividends. At the core of DevRel is being able to understand developer problems and help solve them. Developers are both end-users and decision-makers from a business sense—so outside influences could affect them more than the average stakeholder. Being compassionate and empathizing with developers is incredibly important within peer-driven communities. Attending to real-world issues, both sociological and technical, will help your brand establish itself as a contributor and a true community partner.

The Iron Horse Insight: While most developer marketing is pursuant to end-user developers, it is important to note that developers can play multiple roles within their company. Developer marketing assets should primarily focus on providing solutions and documentation for the product at hand; however, resources and content should also be provided to developers to help them upsell or inform their supervisors and non-technical roles on their teams to facilitate purchase/adoption. Business-to-developer (B2D) outreach should blend both technical and sales-ready assets to ensure that developers are properly educated and prepared to make a case for adoption to their supervisors and leaders.

The Iron Horse Insight: For every successful platform business like Airbnb or Uber there are hundreds of others that don’t make it. This HBR article highlights the reasons platforms fail, and those reasons come down to a lack of understanding about how platforms operate and compete. The one that resonates with us is “failure to engage developers” as we see this frequently. It’s often not about a lack of engagement, but it’s about engaging people in the wrong way. A developer’s interests, needs, and profiles are fundamentally different from the core audience a marketing team is focused on. The offers, type of engagement, and resources you use with your core audience won’t resonate with developers.