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

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 ...Read More

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 the ...Read More

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 the ...Read More

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 comp ...Read More

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. D ...Read More

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. Show, don't tell. Rule number 1 in a product demo is showing the product Nail the messaging - be very clear about what the product does, how it will solve pain points, and who i ...Read More

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 me ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 back ...Read More