AMA: Modern Treasury Manager, Product Marketing, Pranav Deshpande on Developer Product Marketing

You can't think of developer GTM as just another channel you can tack on to an existing GTM motion, like paid social or sponsorships. Developer GTM needs to be an integral component of the company's strategy, with product, engineering, and sales all aligned towards making it successful. It requires hiring a different breed of marketer, specifically developers-turned-marketers, to operate. I think its also a lot easier to build this function during the early stages of your GTM journey to make cross-functonal alignnment easier. A developer GTM strategy requires a strong content and community focus. For some companies, especially those that come from open-source projects, the community focus is programmed into their DNA. They need to focus on hiring the right developer marketing team to produce content the community will find helpful. Marketing to developers looks more like education than marketing. Building content, reference implementations, and tools to make developers' lives easier should be the goal. But you also need to think about what happens after a developer signs up for your product. There needs to be a well-defined plan to nuture them over time or introduce them to a sales rep to discuss their use case in more detail if they have plans to use it in production. The nature of sales changes too, becoming more solutions-oriented and consultative. 

Extremely. If you don't speak their language you will never be able to build credibility with them. Your messaging should also focus on education and explaining what your product does and how it does it instead of why your product is better. Developers tend to be skeptical of any such claims until they've verified for themselves, usually by playing around with the product. Your messaging also needs to be initimately familiar with their current worfklows, habits, and preferences so that you can highlight product capabilities that they might find missing today in other alternatives. 

Your sales team needs a higher level of technical proficiency when you're a B2D company. It's important to hire sales reps that can form their own mental model of how your product works and integrates with the rest of a customers tech stack for them to be successful. They don't need to know how to code, but they do need to be able to develop a strong functional understanding of the product their selling. Assuming you've hired sales reps that fit this criteria, enablement should focus on use cases and technical vocabulary. You should train reps on the types of implementation patterns or use cases they can expect. Technical vocabulary involves helping them understand the terms developers are likely to use and how your products performance in those areas will impact success. 

I think it's important to discuss the objective of investing in marketing to developers before answering this question directly. At Twilio, the Developer Marketing team described their mission as 'inspiring and equipping today's developers to build the next generation of communications'. Their goal was to make Twilio APIs an integral part of the toolkit of any developers, regardless of whether they had an immediate need from them or not. The thesis (which prove to be spectacularly correct) was that if individual developers know and trust Twilio products and use them in their side projects or during hackathons at work, they would advocate for Twilio when it was time to sign an enterprise contract. Content and community participation was core to this strategy. Twilio was at every single developer event, whether large ones like PyCon and even smaller local events or those focused on upcoming languages and technologies. They churned out a steady stream of developer guides, blog posts and viral Twilio apps like the Santa phone. With this objective in mind, I think Developer Relations can be thought of as a distinct function under Developer Marketing that focuses more on the community relations side. It involves building relationships with individual developers, especially those with influence in a certain language or technology, as well as managing your presence at relevant developer events. It can also include your social media presence as well as virtual events like Twitch or YouTube livestreams. Dev Rel works with the Developer Education function (responsible for developer guides, reference apps and other content) to distribute content to the right developer audiences. In my experience, most companies do not have this level of specialization until they are a lot bigger. It's usually the same people responsible for both Dev Rel and Dev Ed. However explicitly recongizing this distinction can help with specialization down the line.