AMA: Dbt Labs Former Director of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Developer Product Marketing

I start with personas. I develop a thesis about core personas based on sales and customer success feedback, and then conduct user interviews to validate or invalidate those ideas. That's probably the most important bit–my job isn't to just synthesize learnings from within our business, it's to continually test and validate those learnings externally. I then circulate research + personas with key executive leaders (CEO, Head of Product, Head of Sales), until we agree on the shape of each. Then I ...Read More

We all miss the mark here. I'm not even sure I would trust a PMM that says they don't struggle with this! You can stack the deck though, to show that you're exploring every possible avenue:  1. Consider a competitive monitoring solution like Crayon. I've used them in the past and even if they can't dig up things like exact product pricing, they will aggregate signals in market like a executive job posting in EMEA that shows they're about to expand internationally, or a change to their pricing pa ...Read More

Same! In my case, I was also dealing with phased launches--bits of the solution released every few weeks. And I understand why–when you're working with a developer audience there's less appetite for a big splashy release, and more interest in a phased roll-out of a given feature or product just to get hands on it ASAP and iterate as quickly as possible. That was tough to get used to. I would start by finding out a little more about what's causing those delays in product.If it's intentional, to p ...Read More

It depends a bit on how your sales team is organized today. But in any event, your product value pillars should always translate to both individual and company-wide gain, so your core message is always consistent, even if the language changes a bit to accomodate the audience. You might consider a mapping exercise that lets you chart that narrative. For example, "velocity" is one of our core product value pillars.  For the individual: Code portability, modularity, and packages helps each develope ...Read More

A great question. I should caveat by saying that if your organization has a seperate DevRel or DevEx team that reports into product isntead of marketing, I don't expect them to share the same methods of measuring community engagement and uplift. For marketing targets, I would look at new feature and product adoption (within first 2 weeks after marketing launch), upsell, retention, and maybe even network effect (mentions elsewhere). Are folks sharing what they've learned from you and writing blog ...Read More

Don't gatekeep access to hands-on learning While the org-wide value story is important, developer product marketing should focus a little more on "why now, why me" Ensure there are materials that help people ramp quickly and easily. Ensure packaging and pricing reflects an ability to not just try, but get sticky, with an incentive (product-based, as in it makes their lives easier) to share with others.  Be frank, be sharp, be honest Create visibile opportunities to contribute to making the produ ...Read More

Great question. We actually have a third unit – Developer Experience. I'm sure it differs at other organizations, but at dbt Labs... Developer Relations is focused on growing the community (measured by Slack members and weekly active projects in the open source product), building lasting relationships with members, enforcing community guidelines, elevating diverse and marginalized voices, and highlighting the contributing work of members around the world. They build trust. Developer Experience i ...Read More

Get crystal clear on the developer persona, and establish a framework for regularly updating it. I don't think there's any better use of your time than talking to folks 1:1 and using the way they frame value to write your own messaging framworks.  I would also take the time to clearly establish roles, boundries, and overlap with any DevRel or DevEx folks at your organization. What are the goals of each. Why are they different? In what ways are they the same? Ensure alignment with that group on c ...Read More

Your documentation needs to be extremely thorough (technical), and your resources need to leave no uncertainty in how or why to use new products and features, but your topline message doesn't necessarily need to be "technical"-- at least not how I think of the word, which is detailed and revealing-full-complexity. It just needs to be frank. Exactly what is the thing, and what can you do with it. Eliminate unecessary superlatives that developers often find dubious like "best" "fastest" "end-to-en ...Read More

If your company is focused on community building, then I think now is the right time to bring that resource aboard. If you mean Dev PMM or Dev Ex (folks a little more focused on creating resources), you can build this capability internally before dropping someone in: Ask other technical folks at the company that you think already have a great voice, and have already built trust in the community (founder, solutions architects, pre-sales engineers, product team), to write and present more. Saying ...Read More