AMA: Google Assistant Developer Marketing Lead, Vishal Naik on Developer Product Marketing

These are some of the main stakeholders a core PMM would work with.  With Sales, I tend to like to see what is resonating with prospects. Is there a specific line or way of telling our story that clicks? I tend to like to use this insight to guide early funnel materials to proactively talk to prospects in a way that resonates.  With CSMs, I’m looking for how current customers are using products and how we can tell stories of unique wins. I think it helps overall positioning if you can factor in ...Read More

In this area, developer marketing isn't that unlike core product marketing, in that the customer journey for Enterprise is more complex. For smaller companies, all phases of the funnel may be targeted at developers. For medium companies, your awareness and marketing may go to decision makers vs your adoption marketing towards developers. For larger companies, things get a bit more complex: You may have decision makers who think about technology (IT, Product, etc), decision makers that think abou ...Read More

While I don't want to discount the personal thrash this puts on you, I’d suggest you quantify the impact in a manner that is around the health of the business. Showcase that there is an opportunity cost to the inability to stick to timelines. Example: When you have a regular cadence in communication, do you see list sizes growing and can you maintain a standard conversion rate? Compared to when you have lapses in communication are you seeing adoption suffer?  How you’ve described this seems to m ...Read More

To line list some metrics I’ve used in the past: number of live integrations in production, number of developer trial sign ups, conversion rate of developer trial sign up to live integration, speed to first integration, go-live success rate, number of integrations per customer, volume of endpoints per customer, etc. It really depends on what your goals are and what data points you have access to. I think the biggest thing is that developer marketing programs and developer metrics need to map bac ...Read More

I’d sum it up with the ability to tell a complicated story quickly and concisely as well as the ability to nuance your work between developer personas and decision maker personas, and understand how partners and end users fit into the equation. I find that sometimes as a developer marketer, I’m doing the same things as my Core PMM peers and at other times I’m working on a completely different set of deliverables with a different tone.  So to excel at developer marketing you’d need to be able to ...Read More

Build great relationships with DevRel, re-evaluate your perception of what channels work or don't work from your previous experience (because developers do act differently than other personas), and pay a lot of attention to the end user. Yes you're focused on developers, and yes developers have unique needs and actions, but they are driven by users. So think about the user because that's where the developer wants to go, and if you can meet the developer where they are going, you can focus on the ...Read More

I tend to look at DevRel as a pretty unique role that's part CSM, part Marketing and part Pre-Sales. Developer Marketing is full-stack marketing around a technical product. To sum it up quickly, DevRel tends to have a great pulse on the developer community and how your current developer audience will feel about your launches or features. Dev Marketing tends to have a pulse on positioning, bill of materials, product management alignment, etc. So I tend to look for Dev Marketing to influence roadm ...Read More

How I described developer marketing in new hire onboarding at a previous company is that a developer platform gives someone the ability to customize their needs in a particular software product. And there’s both a business and consumer opportunity to this. For example, at a previous company we were buying email delivery software and I met with two market leaders. Both did about 80% of what I wanted, because they were built for common use cases, but my organization had our own way of doing things ...Read More

I like to think the developers create the long-tail of use cases for end users. With that, I measure in three dimensions: first, momentum in the platform; second, quantifying end user value; third, measuring impact to the business. In a B2B setting, a customer who has gone through the work of building a customized workflow on top of the developer platform is likely going to be harder for a competitor to take away because the switching costs are so much higher. So I look to measure developer mark ...Read More

I think there are two areas to start with: where the user is working from and what use cases you can create. From a user experience POV, if you need to embed your tool into another system of record, that’s a good starting point. If your software is where your users are going to be working in, then the question I’d ask is if you have the resources to build all of the use cases that your customers may want. If you going to prescribe to an 80/20 rule where you’re able to build those use cases that ...Read More

Developers want to know what something does and how it works. They want to jump in and try it out themselves. They want to see something new and get their hands on it. I’ve seen some persona work that says developers like to be the smartest person in the room and value content that stumps them. So you can say it does need to be technical, but it's not really about how technical the copy is and more around are you creating a message that caters to how the specific persona engages. If you lead wit ...Read More

My biggest piece of advice is to not forget about decision makers and end-users. Developers are a hugely important persona that has a unique set of needs, but they are ultimately not the sole decision maker in most organizations and they build for users. So if you can know about who the developer is building for and who else the developer is going to interact with to make a decision, you can build a pretty sound developer marketing strategy. Oh and do persona work and potentially external resear ...Read More

I don't think that marketing to developers takes you away from the classic marketing funnel. You still need to drive awareness, adoption and advocacy. The difference is that the personas change across the funnel and the steps taken before progressing change. In my opinion, developers have a goal in mind but are task oriented. If you split that statement up, and focus on the goal in mind section–it's about solving a problem that will help their company, drive new user interactions, create a monet ...Read More

The best sales people that I’ve worked with “know enough to be dangerous” meaning they dont try to know everything, but they know enough to have a basic conversation and then know the right resources to bring in to continue the conversation. So I try to arm Sales with 101 level content so that if an API conversation comes up, they can handle the first couple of questions and use it as a reason to schedule a follow up call with an engineer or developer advocate. But if you’re expecting a sales te ...Read More

Newsletters are great--to a developer or not, email marketing has a ton of value. At my last company, email was the #1 driver of actions–that was consistent with web and mobile customers as well. But there are a handful of other mediums you can lean on as well. YouTube, Stack Overflow, Twitch, Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have done pretty well. Also at my last company, someone on my team had the idea to run Google Display ads, and they performed really well. Depending on the size of your or ...Read More

First off, I don't think there is a template on building out the marketing function, it depends on what makes the most sense for your organization. If I were in your shoes, I’d take the Moneyball/Strengthsfinder approach. You’re already on board as a self described non-technical PMM. If you bring in DevRel earlier, you may be able to cover other non-technical marketing needs by yourself and leverage your DevRel counterpart to help carry developers through the funnel with more technical conversat ...Read More