Justine Davis

The best products are built with the market in mind–and product marketing should contribute long before anything gets put on a shelf. It is an expectation that product marketing is involved way before the feature gets built and can answer "can I sell this?" with product. It definitely helps to have joint goals with product so work is not at odds. Product and product marketing are a true partnership and PMMs/PMs who realize this and don't treat the relationship as transactional are far better for it. Product marketing lives in 3 worlds — customers, product, and marketing (of course). And we bring the 3 together. It rests on product marketing to shape a clear, compelling, consistent voice for the product in the market. My marketing counterparts (analyst relations, demand gen, PR, performance marketing, brand, analytics, etc.) are in my team slack channels, attend my team meetings, and we have regular sparring sessions. I treat them as if they are on my team, because they are! Shared goals help here too. To work with CSM and sales, I have monthly business reviews where we do go to market deep dives and swap intel. We have regular win/loss reports, I get pulled in to do customer calls, we make enablement with a feedback loop from sales and CSM on what is needed. 

Be very clear who your buyer is. When going after the enterprise, developers are not your buyer. They are one very influential piece of the puzzle though. Developers will be your end users but ultimately the buyer is likely at the VP level. To build your champions, first build a product they will love and see value out of right off the bat. Give them technical use cases, sandboxes, demos, AMAs with your product teams and/or dev teams, and GREAT documentation to win them over. Do not talk to them about business benefits, they aren't likely to care. That is the message for the buyer. Developers will listen more to getting them out of tedious tasks that they straight up don't want to do on repeat. 

Rather than name the best product demos, I think I will tell you what makes a good product demo. (for what it is worth, Atlassian's demo den series on Youtube from product managers is an exampel of a fantastic product demo series). Your ultimate goal is to educate, inspire, and convince the view to act in a product demo. 1. Show, don't tell. Rule number 1 in a product demo is showing the product 2. Nail the messaging - be very clear about what the product does, how it will solve pain points, and who it is for 3. Do not make it too long - it will become a snooze fest 4. We are in product marketing so tell a story! Analogies are so powerful. Use humor, pull at the heart strings, make your customers feel the pain. 5. Showcase solutions over features - ie don't show me the calendar feature on the iphone. Show me how that calendar feature will solve the chaos of being a VP of marketing, and a mom by telling me a story about my absolutely insane schedule and how the calendar is the cure. 6. Provide social proof - "oh I can see myself in these customers!" 7. Don't create just 1. Sometimes you need to speak to differfent personas about their problems. 8. consider live chat if it is a product demo vs a 1 minute product explainer ad.

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. Don't use cutesy animations and inspirational campaigns for developers, etc. 

Devs really like to be shown as opposed to be told. Don’t create sales decks - instead, take to social media, build smaller feature videos based on each problem - devs don’t want to sit and read a 3 page blog post. Stick to visual things. Channels in no particular order: 1. Reddit is a gold mine but you cannot just pop in to reddit. I spent years building my reddit username karma by posting random non work articles, competitor content, industry content, answering questions not related to my company, etc. (Fun fact, I reached number 1 and am part of the exclusive club who has done that ha!) Only then can you earn enough credit to post your content on developer channels. It is also a goldmine for messaging reading through the threads. 2. Hackernews - if you hit number 1, you will get MAJOR traffic. You cannot just ask everyone to upvote though or your post will get banned. But how do I rank number 1 you say?!?! Write good content. NO clickbait. 3. Google: Developers don't want to be marketed to so your best bet is to optimize great content for keywords and get them to rank... I could write an encyclopedia on ranking on Google, and my team is very good at it. The hardest of keywords will need continuous care, and take over a year. Hire technical writers to help here if you don't have dev rel. 4. Youtube - youtube search and google search are not one in the same. Youtube is the 2nd biggest search channel and you have to optimize for Youtube. Meaning, unlike google, youtube wants you to stay on youtube, not click off to your site. Optimize for playlists and subscribers, and time watched vs clicks in this channel. 5. Conferences - but be mindful that conferences are very expensive to get booths. They are a brand play and do not work as well in product led growth land. Save those bucks and just send developers to submit talks vs sponsoring. 6. Community - build a dev community and place to discuss your product. Give customers access to each other, and access to you via office hours (product managers are good here to answer their questions_. 7. Newsletters - almost every developer tells me they hear about our stuff from newsletters, they are not dead. 8. have a regular blog with feature releases and technical demos and customer stories 9. Add a 'new' section in product for devs to self serve that directs to the above ^ 10. Slack groups (if you have dev rel) 11. influencer marketing etc. :)

Assuming your model is product led growth, you want to track site visits, sign ups, first day usage, week 2 usage, monthly usage, feature usage (especially what features are used first), and upsell. Technical evangelists should be tracked by views and viewer retention rates that eventually lead you to the funnel metrics that marketers track above ^.

Take everything you learned from marketing to typical consumers and throw it out the window. What works for most personas in B2B or B2C will not work here. 1. Developers majorly dislike being marketed to so you have to make marketing feel like it isn't marketing. Interview, interview, and then do some more interviews to understand their pain points. Record these interviews to reference the exact technical language they are referrring to for messaging. 2. Always message test before sending out messaging to trusted developer personas (have some in your back pocket). 3. Don't infiltrate their channels if you cannot hold your own (ie reddit, slack channels, stack overflow, etc.) A marketer has no business here. This is where developer relations comes in. Hire great evangelists to help have the technical conversations and build trust with the community. 4. Build pricing and packaging for devs - free tier, try before you buy with a self sign up. 5. Content marketing > sales tactics (cold emails and cold calls) 5. Do not by any means, use white papers for a developer.

You have to message and target both, with different messages/tactics. Example: Let’s say the platform team evaluate the product themselves. If the developers don’t see enough value in the product then they won’t use it, and the product will fail. My guidance is to understand the end user (developer) and the buyer needs and arm them with both. Target the developer as your champion if they are the end user by making a product that solves their use cases, and stay out of the way. Don't bombard them with sales, gradually let them find product value and then enable them with content for the buyer to convince the sale.

Developer marketing is marketing towards the developer persona. Developers typically hate marketing and will not respond to things like ads, "ship software faster" messaging, and traditional consumer marketing tactics. To be good at developer marketing, you have to speak their language, think about their problems, and put it in the channels they hang out in. Do not copy paste the same marketing plan that you would for an enterprise audience, or a consumr product. 

1. Be literal instead of aspirational 2. Speak to their pain points and really understand what those pain points are 3. Say more with less - white-papers and really long form blogs that are not helpful will not work. Leverage the community aspect as much as possible here and use code snippets, real life get your hands dirty demos