Developer Product Marketing

This is a big question! It would be impossible for me to detail all the ways we work with these teams, but at a high level: * Sales & CSM: I'm bundling these two together, as the type of work we do with each is similar at a high level. We work closely with sales leaders and the sales enablement team to understand sales' needs, develop messaging and content for them to use with both existing and prospective customers, understand how that messaging is resonating, and creating training and other enablement materials. We have a sales enablement group within PMM who drive the...

Cross-functional work is Product Marketing's middle name!  PMM <> Sales * Key deliverables: Pitch decks, enablement assets (internal resources like battlecards and personas, external resources like one-pagers and case studies), and trainings  * Key goals: Improve win rates, improve competitive win rates, increase ASP, shorten sales cycles, improve demo request to demo held rates, generate pipeline, improve sales team confidence  PMM <> CS * Key deliverables: Same as sales, but with an existing customer upgrade / health / cross-sell / retention angle. Add in enablemen...

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...

Regular engagement and alignment in key. I meet with my cross-functional leadership team bi-weekly to ensure we’re aligned on the needs of each team as they evolve and areas of focus. Key goals and deliverables: PMM with Sales: Drive sales success by developing content needed to support the pre-sales customer journey and business goals, such as use cases, pitch decks, customer case studies, and other prospect facing content. PMM with CSM: Drive customer success by developing more in-depth content needed to support the post-sales customer journey and business goals, such as detailed use...

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 ...

It's hard. Real hard.  Many PMMs make the mistake of starting with messaging. This is a no-no. Messaging comes last and just puts words behind what was already decided. You have to nail this in sequential order.  1. First comes strategy 2. Then comes positioning 3. And finally comes messaging Your CEO owns the strategy. Period. If they don't know where you are going, the positioning will be unclear or may work for a little while until the market or your product evolves. I recall a meeting in a prior company where I aligned with the positioning of our chatbot/customer service...

It's key to align around a high-level story that powers success—in sales, marketing, fundraising, product development and recruiting—by getting everyone on the same page about strategy and differentiation. Alignment is difficult. If you can start with your CEO, that is key. Ultimately, your CEO is yuor ultimate storyteller and if she is bought in, then its easier to get the rest of the executive team aligned. The story is the strategy and that should be your starting point. What’s driving your story in the market? New features and functionality … or a bigger promise to your customers?...

I see three parts to driving alignment, both with execs and among all other stakeholders: 1. First, bring them along for the journey. Messaging cannot be done in a silo, and it’s difficult to properly adopt if not everybody feels bought in. Interview your execs and stakeholders to learn their perspective, where they feel the company or product is differentiated, what customer pain it solves, what benefits it delivers. The answers will vary and will be meaningful inputs as you craft and test your messaging. 2. Second, set regular check-ins and milestones with execs a...

To drive alignment, make something that execs can respond to. Recently, I created an example “future state” pitch deck to articulate a future narrative for Glassdoor. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped drive discussion and alignment on overall company positioning and direction. But in general, make something for folks to respond to. I think it is so important for product marketing teams to establish credibility and expectations that PMM owns specific artifacts that ultimately help the company make smarter decisions. We have a toolkit of go-to templates that we try to work from for whatever b...

I feel fortunate that I’ve led positioning/messaging workshops since I graduated college because I worked for an agency that mandated them for every project we worked on for tech clients.  Getting an exec team to agree on a document outlining positioning and messaging isn't the hard part in my opinion. The difficult part is to get the messaging to stick once you put it out in the world: on a homepage, in a blog post, an ad, a slide deck for sales, etc. When positioning and messaging is put to use, execs start to realize what they signed up for. “Wait, we’re going after that job title in ...

At the end of the day, Product Marketing owns messaging, and there should be general alignment around that. I think that's a really important place to start because literally everyone has an opinion or point of view on messaging, but someone ultimately gets to 'own' it. If in your organization, that's PMM, there should be and understanding across the organization that it's the responsibility of PMM/Marketing to come up with product positioning and messaging. If you're an exec / leader in Marketing, you should be building relationships with other execs to create alignment around that; if you...

This is an iterative process, and always better to over-communicate than under-communicate, so we can get everyone's feedback and input and people feel they have been heard and their input taken into consideration. Even if you do not end up going in a certain way, be able to explain why not and why that input was still helpful.

I start with personas. I develop a thesis about core personas based on sales and customer success feedback, and then conduct user interviews to validate or invalidate those ideas. That's probably the most important bit–my job isn't to just synthesize learnings from within our business, it's to continually test and validate those learnings externally. I then circulate research + personas with key executive leaders (CEO, Head of Product, Head of Sales), until we agree on the shape of each. Then I create a messaging house for the business, and each product line, according to the primary person...

Start with data. Ground your messaging in first and third party data that illuminates what is important to your target customers, key pain points, aspirations, how they like to be messaged to, language they use, etc. Show your work -- don’t just include the suggested messaging in the doc; add an appendix or reference section that demonstrates a thoughtful approach that is grounded in the data. Next, see if you can get some quick feedback from target customers on your messaging to further validate the approach before showing it to your exec team. This can be a great use of a CAB (customer ...

Ha! this skill is probably the hardest. When it comes to messaging, everyone will have an opinion. Before you drive alignment on the messaging, align on the problem and solution. That is 50% - 60% of the battle. The rest is just wordsmithing. Depending on the level of messaging, I would incorporate them into the messaging development process. 

Here's my general approach: * Do customer and prospect research (exec team will be more likely to be bought in with data - especially from your key personas and customers)  * Consolidate findings and prepare a messaging brief using the framework you landed on.   * Present those findings to and get feedback from key stakeholders - including marketing leadership, sales, and product team - and (most importantly) customers  * Incorporate feedback into the final messaging brief  * Present messaging to leadership along with the data and the 'why' behind the messaging. Presen...

We typically prepare and validate a strong Messaging and Positioning Framework (MPF) document first. Our template typically includes things like the market context, objectives of our messaging (i.e. what we hope to drive/influence), quick single-sentence description of the product etc. Once we have this document, we circulate it among the exec team (typically months in advance of a launch to give everyone enough time to reflect and comment). We also typically have multiple live discussions on the topic (depending on the complexity of the product/launch) and use the MPF document to drive ali...

Here's my process, I * Conduct customer and prospect research (exec team will be more likely to be bought in with data - especially from your key personas and customers)  * Consolidate findings and prepare a messaging brief using the framework we landed on.   * Present those findings to and get feedback from key stakeholders - including marketing leadership, sales, and product team - and (most importantly) customers  * Incorporate feedback into the final messaging brief  * Present messaging to leadership along with the data and the 'why' behind the messaging. Present ro...

Every executive team is different, so I would encourage you to think through the culture (and sometimes - quirks!) of the members of that team as you craft your own approach. That said, I've found a couple things particularly effective in my experience.  * Bring along key lieutenants for the ride - once you get to the exec team, a number of important leaders should have been part of the ideation and review process. Individual sales leaders, product owners, customer success leads should all be stops on your journey to craft the right message. That way - one of the first slides ...

First, start with data-driven positioning. Who are you in the marketplace? Where are you heading or trying to become? How do you think your competitors are moving in the space? If you skip this step, you'll lack differentiation in your messaging, and you'll get a lot of resistance from executives who think in visionary terms. To build the most effective messaging, you need to start with a deep understanding of how your customers think about your company and why they are buying it in the first place. Draw on insights gleaned from customer blueprints, interviews, surveys, focus groups, looka...

This is so important, and not focused on enough so I'm glad you asked! A few thoughts around this: * Get your CEO and CMO involved early. Ideally you can get early drafts to them, and also get them bought into the importance of the process and value of this effort which will make every aspect of this a lot smoother. * Have a consistent review process. Depending on your size and stage of company, it's unlikely that your executive team needs to see or review every piece of messaging. If you're working on a minor "enhancement" to your product and some lightweight messaging, t...

This requires having a strong relationship built on trust with your executive team and, depending on the size of your company, the CEO. Get the executive team involved early and often, and be willing to disagree and commit. Come prepared to conversations with data, market insights, competitive intelligence, and anything else that will help them understand how critical the work you are doing is. Help them buy into "why this messaging" and "why now" by anticipating their questions, bringing a lens of customer-focus, and a broad understanding of the crossfunctional strategic impact. 

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 innovate faster. As marketers, we articulate how our products are solving business problems. Deve...

Get crystal clear on the developer persona, and establish a framework for regularly updating it. I don't think there's any better use of your time than talking to folks 1:1 and using the way they frame value to write your own messaging framworks.  I would also take the time to clearly establish roles, boundries, and overlap with any DevRel or DevEx folks at your organization. What are the goals of each. Why are they different? In what ways are they the same? Ensure alignment with that group on core value, voice, and tone.

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 resourced for that.  Which underscores some of the other keys to getting started. Assuming alignme...

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 ...

At it's core: it's not different from B2B or B2C when you strip it down to the pillars of what makes for any successful marketing. Understanding your audience: * What are their drivers, their pains, their perceptions?  * Where do they gather?  * Who do they trust?  * How do they influence the buying process in their companies? Are they highly influencial and going to drive product sales and adoption organically? Or is enabling them as a post-sales activity a critical pathway to success and a blocker? * What is the cost to acquire them? What is the lifetime value of a devel...

* Don't gatekeep access to hands-on learning * While the org-wide value story is important, developer product marketing should focus a little more on "why now, why me" Ensure there are materials that help people ramp quickly and easily. * Ensure packaging and pricing reflects an ability to not just try, but get sticky, with an incentive (product-based, as in it makes their lives easier) to share with others.  * Be frank, be sharp, be honest * Create visibile opportunities to contribute to making the product better. Host AMAs, office hours, quarerly roadmap reviews... ena...

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 ...

If your company is focused on community building, then I think now is the right time to bring that resource aboard. If you mean Dev PMM or Dev Ex (folks a little more focused on creating resources), you can build this capability internally before dropping someone in: Ask other technical folks at the company that you think already have a great voice, and have already built trust in the community (founder, solutions architects, pre-sales engineers, product team), to write and present more. Saying "you should write a blog!" will almost never get you what you need on a timeline that you think ...

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 no...

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 whether they're hitting the points of interest that don't just denote that they're ...

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 a...

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 ou...

To me, the only real red flag is being a personality mismatch. Culture fit is important, and working with someone who isn't on the same page as you and the rest of your team around their motivations will only make the job harder and more stressful. Job hopping or gaps in a resume or experience in a different industry or any other potential warning signs aren't actually red flags to me because there is probably a reason behind it all and if you hire the same background all the time, you won't be prepared to solve a new challenge. 

Great question. We actually have a third unit – Developer Experience. I'm sure it differs at other organizations, but at dbt Labs... Developer Relations is focused on growing the community (measured by Slack members and weekly active projects in the open source product), building lasting relationships with members, enforcing community guidelines, elevating diverse and marginalized voices, and highlighting the contributing work of members around the world. They build trust. Developer Experience is focused on creating content for developers that aid in their day-to-day work. Think playbook...

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 product who can speak and directly enable a developer and with whom she can relate. Ideally you re...

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 comm...