AMA: Salesforce Director Product Marketing (Heroku), Srini Nirmalgandhi on Developer Product Marketing

Pricing is hard, especially when the product price has to extract the maximum customer willingness to pay and still leaves some customer value. There is plenty of resources on the web you can find and I don’t want to recommend anything here. From my experience, here are a few things that will be helpful when pricing your B2B product. Good research from interviews and surveys from existing / potential customers, supplemented by consulting firms’ pricing models is a great start. Trade-offs between ...Read More

This is a classical problem for many developer-first companies. Without mentioning names, many have successfully figured out the working model with both strong developer engagement alongside a thriving enterprise revenue stream. Learning from these companies, they always focus on the developer success by doing things such as corporate hackathons, architect support, engineering blogs, etc. that helps to build advocacy for their products. It will be hugely beneficial if the sales enablement progra ...Read More

If you are targeting developer mindshare and attention, be ready to discuss your product in a detail-oriented, transparency-driven way and explain the business value for their situation. So naturally, for being successful in developer product marketing one has to put the product first when talking to developers, not marketing. Typical product marketing managers are great with up-leveling the conversation which might not always work in their favor with developers. Developers generally are well aw ...Read More

To keep it simple, it’s important to have metric-based goals and channels to reach your target audience i.e. developers. The goals of these campaigns could be awareness, trial signups, sales lead, adoption, contribute to your open source project, or a combination of the above, etc. Content has some dependency on the channel, whether it’s social media, email, events, etc. In collaboration with your demand gen/growth marketing team, you can build a matrix of campaign goals vs channels to get a qua ...Read More

Key elements to building a developer marketing program are – relevant jargon-free content, a good understanding of target persona, segment developers based on business context, hands-on trial with access to expert support, medium for interaction i.e. communities, the ability for the audience to contribute - just to name a few. The emphasis of the program shouldn’t be about marketing, rather it’s more of creating awareness, build transparent communication, listening to devs, and helping them to i ...Read More