What does a developer product marketing manager need to be exceptional at compared to product marketing manager?

There aren't developer PMMs and non developer PMMs on my team. A PMM is a PMM and they need to be exceptional at 1) knowing their audience 2) Knowing their market and competition 3) Knowing that content is only as good as the distribtuion plan you put behind it. The third bullet there is the difference - know what channels developers hang out in. Don't make your product times square with ads. Make newsletters. Write long form tutorial and reference architecture content. Create technical demos. D ...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

The skills are the same to be a great marketer for either - knowing your audience, curiosity about people's problems, and a solid understanding of your product's value proposition and differentiation points. For developer-focused PMMs, it is helpful to understand the different types of developers and how they have been changing over time. Popularity in languages, software development methods and trends over time, etc. But mostly, you need to feel comfortable diving into technical topics and stay ...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

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