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

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 areas that will drive sustained health in your platform and yield usage and monetization impact for your developer audience. Oh and be prepared that internally you are often on an island and it's an uphill battle to win internal stakeholders, especially if you're in B2B, but the reward is worth it in the end. 

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 conversations and how-to. But if your lead funnel is both business customers and developers, DevRel may not help you with your business customers. So if your big gap is top of funnel across both personas and getting leads routed appropriately, you may need Demand Gen. Also, what does your customer journey look like? Do customers start with developer tools from day 1, or do they onboard use your existing software and then graduate to the developer platform after a time/usage threshold has been met? That may also guide what makes sense for you. I’d suggest you start with your present state, think about your goals and your ideal customer journey, address your current gaps, and then decide if the best next role is a more technical person on the team or someone who can help you build demand. Personally, I tend to view storytelling as a key part of product marketing, so I’d probably not lean to a dedicated content resource above those other two as I tend to think PMM could own that function pretty well, especially in a smaller org.

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 marketing effectiveness (first) by the volume of actions that take place on the developer platform then (second) by the growth in consumer use cases by way of the platform with an ultimate goal (third) of creating additional business health (high ASP, low churn, etc.) In a B2C setting, the first two dimensions would be the same but the third dimension would be something around customer engagement–DAU for the integrations, engagement within a time frame for the cohort of users leveraging the integration vs those not, etc.

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 organization you may also have a Developer Relations team. Hosting events or webinars/livestreams also tend to perform well. And don't forget your website and your blog, because your developer content is often one of the first places a developer will go to find out information. So think of it like marketing to any customer base: consider where they are in the funnel, think about what actions they need to take to get to the next step, and then leverage the mediums you have at your disposal to push them through the funnel.

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 team to carry the full conversation with a developer, it's probably not going to be a successful outcome as it's too specialized (persona style, talk track, questions, etc.) versus your sales team's normal buyer. 

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. So neither product completely solved our needs. A developer platform on top of either would have given my company the ability to make some customizations to solve 100% of our needs. Another example is when you as a consumer use Facebook to log in to a website. With this functionality, the website owner doesn't need to create a login experience and also doesn't have to tap into the entirety of Facebook. The Developer is the person that writes this code for a software product. Developer Marketing is how we as marketing professionals excite developers to try new functionality as well as evangelize the work that developers have done to excite customers to try these new user experiences.

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 about the future (Business Owners, Innovation teams), Developers that do the work (junior level Devs) and Developers that set direction and give guidance (senior level Devs). You’ll also have companies that choose to build in house vs companies that choose to leverage a partner. So your PMM work will have to matrix across the funnel by persona.

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 back to core business drivers. At a previous company, our goals were to grow the volume of customers using APIs and then to get those customers to build with multiple APIs, or even multiple endpoints within our most popular API–so we wanted to see how we could speed up time to go-live, measure endpoint volume and build a linear map of which APIs followed our most popular one in a customer’s build journey. Alternatively, if your focus is on hero use cases, then you may want to consider metrics that focus on depth across an integration while also considering developer experience metrics. So I’d suggest you look first to your product strategy and data access and choose which dimensions best support.

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 roadmap, build a product narrative / comms plan and execute GTM vs DevRel to engage the developer community, surface back real-time feedback and help developers that are building an integration to actually get it live. Think of it as DevRel is a little closer to the customer and a little later in the funnel than where Dev Marketing sits. 

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 with the story arc of market problem -> winners and losers -> product solves problem, that won't really tell a developer how to create something. Rather than look at it as how technical messaging needs to be for developers, I look at it as the core developer work isn't always early funnel. And early funnel content is more around the art of what's possible vs later funnel content is more around how to get something done. Marketing to developers tends to map closer to later funnel content. 

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 appeal to the masses, then a developer platform where customers or external developers can solve for those last mile use cases, would also add value. In terms of building the marketing program, Id start with that top level goal as that will help you drive your value prop and also help define why developers are coming to your platform. From there I’d get into the details by uncovering what customer value developer offerings would bring, as you’d want to figure out how to market to developers while also planning for how to market what developers create. (Tip: keep these functions aligned, splitting up marketing to and marketing of developers is one of the biggest reasons where I’ve seen developer marketing fail) As you build out your developer marketing team and function, keep a healthy mix of technical people that can speak to the API details and coding work but don't forget about core marketers who can speak to decision maker personas and can layer in the business value of the developer platform. Over-indexing on one or another will yield an underwhelming program. And while being scrappy is great, its easier and faster to bring in an agency to do market research to find the answer to that hard question than it is to hire a candidate who has done the specific thing you do in the specific way you want to do it. Gravitate to speed towards the answer you need rather than needle-in-a-haystack domain expertise. 

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 research on all of these audiences. Developers don't like being marketed to and will see through any fluff, so how you nuance your message to resonate with this group is important, you’ll want to be more sure of your message than with other audiences so you may need to do some extra validation. 

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 go broad compared to when Core PMM needs to go deep. For example, I don't write as many blogs or build as many decks as I used to when I wasn't focused on developers, but I still need to do that set of work every now and then. But in addition to that, I’ll work with partners, work on hackathons, tap into developer specific channels, etc. 

Generally speaking, developer platforms bring about more customer usage and higher customer retention, so from a pricing standpoint, I tend to not get too deep on how to price dev tools–because the long term approach of healthy revenue generating customers is more valuable than a short term lift in charging for access to the platform. If you’re really getting serious on pricing, I’d suggest you look to a research firm to do some discrete choice modeling for you.

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 me like your product team isn't aware of the unintended consequences that are happening by missing deadlines. If you can showcase how this behavior is negatively impacting the company, you can help to showcase the value of not only sticking to timelines but also of the PMM function and of your deliverables.

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 monetization stream, etc. That requires thought about the end user and how to influence the business to cater to that end user. And for that task oriented section–a developer may read your documentation or go to Reddit or Stack Overflow before signing up for a sandbox, then build a proof of concept, then test all of this before publishing anything live. So the fundamental funnel is still the same, I just tend to look at it as though you’ll need to consider different persona types and different checkpoints than you would in a classic B2B or B2C journey.

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 real world usage, and customers may leverage a product in a way that you or your PM may not have thought of. For both Sales and CS, though, I tend to look at these relationships as ones where you build and cultivate on a one off basis. Over time, as you prove value to these teams by delivering back materials that help them in their roles, you’ll build a better cadence, but they aren't roles where it's easy to get a recurring cadence going without proving value first. In an old role, we actually sat our PMM team on the sales floor so that we could stay connected with top sellers and sales managers to keep a pulse on the market. This really helped drive business forward as we could easily market around what was working for prospects. For Marketing, you really do need to have close coordination. After all, a PMM would be the SME on the product itself, why it's of value to customers and how to talk about the product. Our fellow marketers would be the SMEs on how to get that message out in the market and how to drive the KPIs that we’re looking to see relative to the funnel. This relationship feels the most likely, to me, for a regular sync to stay connected. And product tends to be, in my opinion, the main stakeholder. Some of the best PM/PMM relationships I’ve had didn't require a weekly or bi-weekly cadence, because we’d each connect with our counterparts for the areas where their expertise was needed. But I’d suggest you go into meetings with your PM stakeholders with a mindset of showcasing the market and the user trends or competitive issues that you're seeing that can help product do their jobs well.