AMA: Atlassian VP / Head of Product Marketing, Agile and DevOps solutions, Justine Davis on Developer Product Marketing

Be very clear who your buyer is. When going after the enterprise, developers are not your buyer. They are one very influential piece of the puzzle though. Developers will be your end users but ultimately the buyer is likely at the VP level. To build your champions, first build a product they will love and see value out of right off the bat. Give them technical use cases, sandboxes, demos, AMAs with your product teams and/or dev teams, and GREAT documentation to win them over. Do not talk to them about business benefits, they aren't likely to care. That is the message for the buyer. Developers will listen more to getting them out of tedious tasks that they straight up don't want to do on repeat. 

In product is good, but only if it is helpful. Do not make your product times square. Release. notes, blogs, social leading to blogs, whats new section in product, office hours, newsletters, etc. work well. Just give them the option to self serve the information they need and stay out of their way for a solid product led growth funnel for developers. 

There aren't developer PMMs and non developer PMMs on my team. A PMM is a PMM and they need to be exceptional at 1) knowing their audience 2) Knowing their market and competition 3) Knowing that content is only as good as the distribtuion plan you put behind it. The third bullet there is the difference - know what channels developers hang out in. Don't make your product times square with ads. Make newsletters. Write long form tutorial and reference architecture content. Create technical demos. Don't use cutesy animations and inspirational campaigns for developers, etc. 

DevRel and Dev Marketers are 2 sides of the same coin. Developer relations (or tech evangelists) are responsible for the truly technical content with the ultimate goal of building a developer community to market the product. Developer marketers partner with DevRel to distribute their content and drive funnel marketing goals. Examples: DevRel: * is go to for message testing and technical BS-ometer * Distill technical differentiation into positioning statements, messaging, and value propositions that will be leveraged throughout sales and marketing * Work with product management to distill key functionality and benefits into core product marketing messages, and create technical narratives that differentiate with technical users * writes the long form SEO content, technical demos, technical talks * create/execute a content strategy that encompasses strategic partner’s external sites as well as ours (video, technical documentation, use cases) * co-develop marketing plan with strategic partner - what channels are we missing? what are cool use cases? What placements or integrations should we ask for in product? * Assist in building partner pitches (with technical knowledge), Plan, produce, and maintain technical competitive intelligence and sales enablement tools and training. * Provide competitive intelligence and enablement to the field * Speaks at conferences and/or user groups - more technical use cases and thought leadership * identifies speaking opportunities we should be in that scale * Monitors & responds to Atlassian Community, HN, Reddit forums * Channels customer usability feedback from the external community back to the internal teams to improve our products * Be the translation layer between product and product marketing for technical concepts. * Authors design/user guides, technical blog posts, how-to tutorials, builds demos and delivers high-quality training material, webinars, presentations, data sheets, technical white papers, web content, and reference architectures. * Creates sandboxes and knows products deeply in order to inform technical content Developer Marketing: * writes the messaging * distributes the content * drives strategic partnerships: report on performance, decide on GTM iniatives * Creates sales enablement (CIO/CTO/VP decks), battle cards * creator of customer stories * creator of landinag pages * writes feature launch blogs * driver of press/ analyst relations / conference stories * demand gen * PMM counterpart to a product squad * PR/AR audience launch blog = pmm writes and technical pmm reviews. * message house to inform landing page, activation emails * Branding * Executes on on-boarding strategy * Onboarding: Develop, test, and implement onboarding programs to activate new users (activation emails) * funnel optimization * Pricing and packaging - Ability to use pricing as a strategic lever, ability to build the biz case and ability to sell the organization on the vision. * Be the expert on all technical buyer personas, understanding their buying agendas and how they evaluate and buy. * Speaks at conferences and/or user groups - product value presentations * competitor analysis

1. Create a community and push all your content towards that community. 2. Create a newsletter that devs get opted in to or sign up for (but follow those GDPR rules) 3. Spend time on good documentation. Good documentation is marketing in itself 4. Find your open source element to tap in to the open source community. 5. Comparison articles are powerful 6. Recruit your developers to write and publish the content (or hire dev rel, but not before your first PMM). 

The best products are built with the market in mind–and product marketing should contribute long before anything gets put on a shelf. It is an expectation that product marketing is involved way before the feature gets built and can answer "can I sell this?" with product. It definitely helps to have joint goals with product so work is not at odds. Product and product marketing are a true partnership and PMMs/PMs who realize this and don't treat the relationship as transactional are far better for it. Product marketing lives in 3 worlds — customers, product, and marketing (of course). And we bring the 3 together. It rests on product marketing to shape a clear, compelling, consistent voice for the product in the market. My marketing counterparts (analyst relations, demand gen, PR, performance marketing, brand, analytics, etc.) are in my team slack channels, attend my team meetings, and we have regular sparring sessions. I treat them as if they are on my team, because they are! Shared goals help here too. To work with CSM and sales, I have monthly business reviews where we do go to market deep dives and swap intel. We have regular win/loss reports, I get pulled in to do customer calls, we make enablement with a feedback loop from sales and CSM on what is needed. 

Assuming your model is product led growth, you want to track site visits, sign ups, first day usage, week 2 usage, monthly usage, feature usage (especially what features are used first), and upsell. Technical evangelists should be tracked by views and viewer retention rates that eventually lead you to the funnel metrics that marketers track above ^.

Technical evangelists should be tracked by views and viewer retention rates that eventually lead you to the funnel metrics that marketers track. Ultimately you will want develoepr marketing to roll in to the regular metrics you track as a marketing leader with traffic, evaluations, active usage, customers, and revenue. 

Traditional sales tactics will not help you start conversations with developers. you will rely more on content marketing than sales in order to "sell" to developers. Do not cold call developers. Instead make it very clear how your product will solve developer problems on a very technical level. You have a choice - 1. you can try to build a champion with the developer through some of the tactics I discuss in other answers here, then have them champion the product to their VP or CTO who owns the budget. (preferred) or 2. You could go after the dev lead/manager with more traditional B2B tactics but if their developers are not asking for it, they are not buying it. 

I would say long form content messaging needs to be very technical towards developers and that is where developer evangelists are powerful at building brand trust and community. Short form messaging is the same as any other messaging: needs to understand the target audience and speak to their pain points, then give them the "so what" that your product can help them with. 

Take everything you learned from marketing to typical consumers and throw it out the window. What works for most personas in B2B or B2C will not work here. 1. Developers majorly dislike being marketed to so you have to make marketing feel like it isn't marketing. Interview, interview, and then do some more interviews to understand their pain points. Record these interviews to reference the exact technical language they are referrring to for messaging. 2. Always message test before sending out messaging to trusted developer personas (have some in your back pocket). 3. Don't infiltrate their channels if you cannot hold your own (ie reddit, slack channels, stack overflow, etc.) A marketer has no business here. This is where developer relations comes in. Hire great evangelists to help have the technical conversations and build trust with the community. 4. Build pricing and packaging for devs - free tier, try before you buy with a self sign up. 5. Content marketing > sales tactics (cold emails and cold calls) 5. Do not by any means, use white papers for a developer.

Developer marketing is marketing towards the developer persona. Developers typically hate marketing and will not respond to things like ads, "ship software faster" messaging, and traditional consumer marketing tactics. To be good at developer marketing, you have to speak their language, think about their problems, and put it in the channels they hang out in. Do not copy paste the same marketing plan that you would for an enterprise audience, or a consumr product. 

Ah the famous chicken or the egg problem. DevRel is most powerful when partnered with a marketer who knows how to get eyeballs on the technical content. This is a partnership in the most beautiful form, hard for one to be successful without the other. Since you are the first marketer, it is time for an evangelist. UNLESS you have a developer who absolutely loves writing, and is raising their hand to partner with you on content. But let's face it, when coding calls, your content drops to the backlog so your best bet is to have a dedicated resource. All the marketers in the world won't move the needle if you aren't confident in your message or can't speak the developer language. 

There is not really a difference if you are working at a product led growth company. You should drop developer sign ups the same way you would track any marketing funnel: * Site visits * Evaluations * first day usage * second week usage * monthly active usage * feature usage * upsell * customers * revenue The real difference is the channels you use to market to them. See some of my answers from channel questions in the AMA for where to go for those!

Devs really like to be shown as opposed to be told. Don’t create sales decks - instead, take to social media, build smaller feature videos based on each problem - devs don’t want to sit and read a 3 page blog post. Stick to visual things. Channels in no particular order: 1. Reddit is a gold mine but you cannot just pop in to reddit. I spent years building my reddit username karma by posting random non work articles, competitor content, industry content, answering questions not related to my company, etc. (Fun fact, I reached number 1 and am part of the exclusive club who has done that ha!) Only then can you earn enough credit to post your content on developer channels. It is also a goldmine for messaging reading through the threads. 2. Hackernews - if you hit number 1, you will get MAJOR traffic. You cannot just ask everyone to upvote though or your post will get banned. But how do I rank number 1 you say?!?! Write good content. NO clickbait. 3. Google: Developers don't want to be marketed to so your best bet is to optimize great content for keywords and get them to rank... I could write an encyclopedia on ranking on Google, and my team is very good at it. The hardest of keywords will need continuous care, and take over a year. Hire technical writers to help here if you don't have dev rel. 4. Youtube - youtube search and google search are not one in the same. Youtube is the 2nd biggest search channel and you have to optimize for Youtube. Meaning, unlike google, youtube wants you to stay on youtube, not click off to your site. Optimize for playlists and subscribers, and time watched vs clicks in this channel. 5. Conferences - but be mindful that conferences are very expensive to get booths. They are a brand play and do not work as well in product led growth land. Save those bucks and just send developers to submit talks vs sponsoring. 6. Community - build a dev community and place to discuss your product. Give customers access to each other, and access to you via office hours (product managers are good here to answer their questions_. 7. Newsletters - almost every developer tells me they hear about our stuff from newsletters, they are not dead. 8. have a regular blog with feature releases and technical demos and customer stories 9. Add a 'new' section in product for devs to self serve that directs to the above ^ 10. Slack groups (if you have dev rel) 11. influencer marketing etc. :)

Rather than name the best product demos, I think I will tell you what makes a good product demo. (for what it is worth, Atlassian's demo den series on Youtube from product managers is an exampel of a fantastic product demo series). Your ultimate goal is to educate, inspire, and convince the view to act in a product demo. 1. Show, don't tell. Rule number 1 in a product demo is showing the product 2. Nail the messaging - be very clear about what the product does, how it will solve pain points, and who it is for 3. Do not make it too long - it will become a snooze fest 4. We are in product marketing so tell a story! Analogies are so powerful. Use humor, pull at the heart strings, make your customers feel the pain. 5. Showcase solutions over features - ie don't show me the calendar feature on the iphone. Show me how that calendar feature will solve the chaos of being a VP of marketing, and a mom by telling me a story about my absolutely insane schedule and how the calendar is the cure. 6. Provide social proof - "oh I can see myself in these customers!" 7. Don't create just 1. Sometimes you need to speak to differfent personas about their problems. 8. consider live chat if it is a product demo vs a 1 minute product explainer ad.

1. Be literal instead of aspirational 2. Speak to their pain points and really understand what those pain points are 3. Say more with less - white-papers and really long form blogs that are not helpful will not work. Leverage the community aspect as much as possible here and use code snippets, real life get your hands dirty demos

You have to message and target both, with different messages/tactics. Example: Let’s say the platform team evaluate the product themselves. If the developers don’t see enough value in the product then they won’t use it, and the product will fail. My guidance is to understand the end user (developer) and the buyer needs and arm them with both. Target the developer as your champion if they are the end user by making a product that solves their use cases, and stay out of the way. Don't bombard them with sales, gradually let them find product value and then enable them with content for the buyer to convince the sale.