Aligning Developer Marketing with Product

This is an excerpt from my upcoming Developer Marketing and Developer Relations book. Be sure to subscribe to this newsletter and be notified when pre-sales are available.

Developer marketing and product teams must work in lockstep to ensure seamless messaging, adoption, and growth. Unlike traditional marketing, developer marketing must be deeply embedded in the product lifecycle to support bottom-up adoption. The key to success is ensuring that marketing understands and influences product development, while product understands and enables marketing efforts.

Why alignment with product matters

Developers do not buy hype. The output of product marketing (positioning, messaging, launch management, partner enablement, sales enablement, and so on) must match a product’s capabilities. Under-promise and over-deliver is the mantra of developer marketing, and when the mantra is inverted, developers will tune out the product and company entirely.

In fact, the more integrated marketing is with the product, the more effective marketing will be. Customers will find value out of simple messaging because the messaging is aligned with the product’s promise. And the inverse is true. If marketing is in touch with customers, building community engagement tools and listening tactics, the voice of the customer will be imbued within the product from the get-go.

As I’ve always said in my career, it is a lot easier to market a diamond than it is to market a pile of poop. Ensuring that your marketing and product are aligned will guide the product team towards building the right products for the right customers, which will make your job easier on the other end.

Simple tools for embedding marketing in product

First of all, Product Marketing should be present in product and engineering meetings. Be present and contribute to roadmap discussions. Understand the customer and represent the customer’s interest and values.

Marketing should also use the same issue tracking system as product and engineering. Marketing and sales teams that sit in tools like Monday while product and engineering sit in tools like Jira results in disconnects. Marketing work items should be created as part of product releases, and they should be linked in the system so that everyone has visibility into the work necessary to launch. It’s not the case that product needs to know the minutiae of marketing (or vice versa), it’s that big projects are considered complete only when both product and go-to-market are represented.

You’ll also run feedback loops with developers, using forums, surveys, and direct interviews. Take the time to internalize product usage and industry trend data and use them to guide roadmap decisions.

Lastly, as we’ve discussed, documentation is a core aspect of not only product, but marketing as well. Use early product design decisions to shape documentation and provide customers with not only factual information about how to use the product, but blog posts and introductory text in docs that shed light on why features were implemented in certain ways.

All of these things ensure that product and customers are aligned, which ultimately makes sure there is no daylight between marketing and product.

Aligning messaging

One of the most important deliverables of Product Marketing is a strategy for how you talk about the product with your target customer, and the venues in which you will carry that message in order to reach them. Your product and engineering team should be part of that discussion and setting the tone early that the teams are unified and contribute to one another’s work will ensure that when you need help on messaging, the teams will be there to support you.

Areas where Product Marketing can push product

Product Marketing also has a role in pushing for changes in how products are built. Be sure to be an active voice in product onboarding. Your job isn’t done at sign-ups. You need to make sure your strategies for driving sign-ups align with how the product carries a new user to an activated user. You should have data-driven and interview-driven information to guide product in making the correct decisions about a user’s earliest steps inside your product. If you’re marketing to super-technical database developers, onboarding will look quite different than if you were marketing to low-code knowledge workers.

You will want to implement product usage analytics in the product. Often, development teams will push back on server-side analytics or implementing integration with CRMs, such as Salesforce or HubSpot. These integrations are absolutely critical for a well-functioning, data-driven marketing organization. You need to make a strong case and push for it to be implemented.

You also have a strong role to play in driving the overall developer experience. Most developers in the product team have very little experience using the product end-to-end. In contrast, Developer Relations and Product Marketing build demos, write collateral, and create conference talks that show a complete “left to right” view of the product in a way that very few product or engineering members of the organization ever do. As such, you have the moral authority (and perhaps responsibility?) to represent a cohesive view of the developer experience.

As a side note, never stop using your product. Build a side hustle app for fun and continue to add features to it using features your company, your partners, and even your competitors ship, as they ship it. The difference between an average Product Marketer and a great Product Marketer is right here in this paragraph.

Summary

Developer marketing is most effective when aligned with the product. The key to success is tight feedback loops, shared goals, and data-driven insights that connect marketing with product development.

• Respect the customer’s voice. Ensure accurate messaging based on product reality.
• Embed yourself in the product team. Sit in on their meetings, use their issue tracking system, and contribute to roadmap decisions. Work hard to be a part of the team that designs and develops the product.
• Push where necessary. You have needs of the product team as well, so don’t be afraid to use your relationship with the product team and the respect you gain by being present in product decisions to make sure marketing’s needs are being met.
• Developer Marketing has a unique perspective on the developer experience. Unlike engineers who work on isolated features, marketing and Developer Relations interact with the product holistically and should push for improvements that enhance usability.
• Great Product Marketers use their own product. Continuously building with your product (and competitors’ products) gives you the insight to create better messaging and developer experiences.

Subscribe to notifications about my upcoming Developer Marketing and Developer Relations book.