Developer Marketing
Developer Marketing, Mikhail Vink at ProductCamp Berlin 2014
Every developer knows marketing better than you, so they would be resistant to your message. So we’ll have to prove our standpoint
How to rock developer market
- Be respectful
- Speak the same language
- Deliver only dry content, content matters more than design
- remember about word of mouth
- create community around the product
Sales process revised, no outbound sales
- word of mouth
- from developer to manager
- and no “classic” salespeople
Be close to your target audience = be developer (in our case)
Support is the best marketing
- you talk to developers!
- open issue tracker
- email support
- forums (community support)
- social media
Communications
- blog posts
- screencasts
- tutorials
- webinars
- documentation
- E-mail marketing
What’s special about PMMs?
- Technical people
- work close with development team
- “Hub” to other teams
- release management
- business goals in mind
- be with community - understand product and market
Communities issues
- Language / technology specifics
- Many autonomous entities
- They can hate each other
- … and you are not a part of community
Create Community - turn your customers into your advocates
Social Network - Who to focus at
- Community leaders
- Trend setters
- News makers
Meet Mikhail Vink, Global Marketing Programs Manager at JetBrains
You worked as a PMM for several years. What is the key thing about this job? Everyone defines it differently, so I’m interested to get your take on it.
A PMM must think about the business side of the product. They need to serve as a user advocate inside the company and the product development team.
Does that mean you interacted with users a lot?
Yes, that was part of my routine. Community outreach was instrumental in helping us enter certain markets.
Developer Advocate
What is it:
- Make it easy for developers to use the product / platform
- Communicate to external developers, introduce about the product that I represent, both to get them excited about the product, but also to give them enough information about it, so they can know whether it fits their needs.
- Developer outreach / developer marketing
- Sharing thoughts and learnings about technologies
- Come up with strategies and tactics to encourage the adoption of your platform, build metrics to find out how well the adoption is
Online activities:
- Setting up Repos & Libraries for products or SDKs / Writing “Get Started” / Sample Code
- Documentation
- Writing Blog posts
- Recorded workshops / Podcasts / Online communities-building
Overall, community interaction is a hugely valuable activity for me, because this is where I really get to see what software people are building “out in the wild”, ideally help them find solutions that will aid them in their endeavours as well as mentally match that back to what we are doing at Google as we can build a better service.
Offline Channels:
- Conferences / meetups, building a narrative that people can use to understand a topic, and having them be able to walk away having a deeper understanding than they had before
- On-site, provide how to use the product (integration), together with sales
- Product Feedbacks
- Voice of developers / Gather community feedbacks
Difficulties:
- Stage fright
- Live coding
- Traveling
Others:
- Perpetual learners
- Power User showing-off tools and shortcuts, convince the audience
- “API Developers”, heavily relying on code snippets / completions
- Not: Training / Marketing / Sales / Support
Refs