AMA: Matterport Former VP of Product Marketing and Platform, Indy Sen on Developer Product Marketing

There's no silver bullet for this. You want to bake competitive research into everything you do and have your antennae out. The cool thing about product marketing is that done right, you have a unique vantage point. You are the closest members of your team to customer conversastions, product conversations as well as what analysts and influencers think of you. So you have to synthesize those inputs. Take and share notes on an ongoing basis and then summarize findings in battlecards, competitive d ...Read More

I'd say the mindset shift in B2D is that it's no longer "sales enablement", but just "enablement". And that should be a shared goal across your organization, whether it's the marketing team, sales team, product or support team who are dealing with your developer.  You are correct in saying that developers do not want to be sold to, but they'll still want good support if they need it. That comes in different forms and the good news is that your organization can divide and conquer across this.  Fi ...Read More

The key thing is will he or she be able to effectively fight for developers to have a distinct voice within your organization, especially for what they need to do in order to be successful.  I've been at many companies where developer marketing or the B2D platform play was secondary or complementary to our key enterprise B2B play. T There's some baggage that comes with that from a GTM standpoint... notably a visual and verbal identity that doesn't fit all sizes.  There's a myth that developers d ...Read More

In of the questions above I alluded to having a developer marketing funnel. This is like your classic marketing funnel across top of funnel and middle of funnel but where bottom of the funnel should end up being focused on adoption and advocacy, not sales.  Which leads us to how you measure effectiveness. Like with any GTM, you need to first begin by what you want to achieve before designing goals and measuring things. By and large these are the metrics broken out by funnel stages. Top of funnel ...Read More

I'd say Developer Marketing + Developer Relations = Developer GTM. You'll want to pair these two functions as much as possible, and the way I've always thought about it is that Dev Marketing structures and provides the overall air cover (awareness, channel and content strategy, program management, measurement) and Dev Rel parachutes in for the high-touch stuff: enablement, evangelization, content production.  Dev Rel are the true subject matter experts, the most authentic voices behind your prod ...Read More

The key to getting started imho is alignment. This is especially important in B2B/B2C organizations where developer marketing may exist alongside a traditional marketing organization that's focused on the customer/buyer persona. Developer marketing, as mentioned in some of the answers above, is not your traditional marketing discipline in that it's more focused on adoption and advocacy than revenue. If you are being asked to have an impact on revenue, you'll just need to make sure you're resourc ...Read More

Good question. You should definitely have the technical stuff at the ready, and usually docs will be your best friend for that, as would "Getting Started" guides, video walkthrough, etc.  But I tend to think of the technical stuff as the what and messaging as the how.  Developers are people too :) You don't have to throw the technical goobledygook at them outright. Especially when you're trying to convince them of your value props. That's where good messaging comes in. Be as straightforward and ...Read More

Lol, yes, marketing to developers and technical audiences like data scientists is not for the faint of heart.  They are naturallly suspicious of glitzy marketing, and have very low tolerance for buzz words (e.g. "business transformation", "collaborative intelligence", etc). Wining and dining them will only take you so far (to this day, engineers are the only employees who get a free meal at Apple). And when you ask for feedback, boy will they give you feedback. Brutal. Honest. Feedback. But here ...Read More

Yep, a question that's near and dear to my heart because accurately representing your developer journey is such a clarity boost for everyone on the team. I like to think of the developer journey as a developer funnel. That's why developer marketing is still marketing at its heart.  Traditional funnel, as always: Top of funnel: Awareness, Interest Middle of funnel: Consideration Bottom of funnel: Preference, Sale Developer funnel, is very similar, with the exception of BoFu: Top of funnel: Awaren ...Read More

I like the spirit of this question, as it's not just relevant to API products but also any product that has a similar onramp due to it being technical. You also touch on something that many inadvertently forget--that it's not enough to launch a product, you also have to think about the "landing" and how to drive continuous engagement. Here are the few things I've seen teams do:  At the product level, you want to monitor API usage, and depending on the behaviors you're trying to drive, figure out ...Read More