Articles we like.

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.