The Engaged Developer Funnel

Stephen: Thanks so much and it's great to see everyone here at DevRelCon. What I'm going to talk a bit about is exactly what he was describing. How do you as a DevRel leader talk to the C-Suite? How do you talk to the CEO? How do you talk to the board of directors and how do you explain the value of what you do as a DevRel expert? Now, I've been speaking and attending conferences for a very long time. I was keynoting the stage at InfoBip Shift last year. It was just up on stage at AI Engineer Worlds Fair where we talked about AI and graph technology and have been doing both personally, a lot of developer advocacy. I'm always on the front lines doing this, but then also leading teams which are doing this. I currently lead the team at Neo four J where we have about a dozen folks doing developer advocate activities.

Previously, I led the DevRel team at jfr, so we did DevOps, security and a lot of that, and I helped them go through IPO and scale up the DevRel team. Again, it was about a dozen people in DevRel plus partner marketing, plus some open source projects that I ran there. And I also, previous to that, ran the developer marketing team at Oracle. So this is a very long journey I've been on. Back when I started it was technology evangelist, so I'm dating myself in terms of how Dev res evolved, and now we understand that we're advocating for developers. We're not just evangelising to them, we're not just selling them. And I'll start out with a personal story. I'm not going to name the company, but I built a really strong developer relations team. We had a lot of great activities. We ran a whole conference series, we had forums.

We had a lot of metrics and detailed information about the impact we had on the business. And we thought our team, our deral team thought we were doing an amazing job for the business. Now, there were some leadership changes in the company, not my boss, but the chief marketing leader left the company. My main advocate in engineering left the company. So there was a little bit of turnover. And then I met the new leader of marketing who was my kind of indirect boss at one of our events. And I thought I had everything lined up. So we had, if you guys are familiar with him as the keynote speaker, we had a wonderful woman in tech panel and actually the chief marketing leader was on the woman in tech panel and talking a bit about her experiences leading tech efforts and just a really strong lineup with great demos, great engagement with the audience. And I asked the marketing leader, I'm like, well, what did you think of the events? What was your impression of it? She was like, well, I didn't really like the branding.

So now as a developer relations leader, that makes your heart sink, right? You're like, we've been putting all this work in, we've been making sure we have the right metrics, we have the right things to show results from, but we're clearly there's a disconnect with leadership on what they value. Okay? So what I'm going to talk a bit about is a different way of thinking about the marketing funnel and different way of thinking about how you express what you're doing and what you're accomplishing to leaders. Now, this is the traditional marketing funnel. Are folks familiar with this? So you got leads come in, that's kind of high level, maybe DevRel contributes to that. You qualify leads, they turn to sales, qualify opportunities. Eventually they turn into a customer. And who doesn't like more customers, right? Yeah, we love more customers. Now the problem is when your metrics as a developer advocate or working in a developer relations organisation are tied to this funnel, you are doomed to failure.

You can get a lot more leads simply by doing campaigns and sending blasts out and doing things. Are they quality leads? No. But you get more leads. You can quote, get more M qls by sponsoring big events like reinvent or just pushing people through the funnel. So at every single stage, there is a more cost-effective way to accomplish the marketing funnel than developer relations. Now, there is a value to developer relations, and that's because the way people learn, the way developers learn is very different than the marketing funnel. But there's a different way of thinking about this, which is what we do as developer relations people is we build engaged developers. And when I say engaged developer, what I mean is, I mean somebody who knows the technology. Oh, here's the funny slides. Okay, let's take a break from the actual talk and do funny slides.

Okay, let's lead Jen. So this is kind of a funny take on how you might think about different parts of marketing organisation, but for generating leads, there's the top of the funnel. If the light bulb broken, bring in more light bulbs and more and more. So there are better ways to get leads than simply actually engaging with developers. Another example of this is content marketing. So I apologise if I'm offending anybody who's in a product marketing organisation, if the light bulb's broken you, no idea to fix it writes a 2000 word experts guide on changing a light bulb, probably AI generated now and then this is the ultimate marketing tool candy, and it goes with a fun joke about marketing people convincing a light, and it goes back to playing Candy Crush. Okay, sorry about that. Now how do developers actually learn? So one way that developers learn is by doing, by actually being hands on learning technology.

And if you have a free version of your product, if you have tutorials or guides online, this is actually how developers want to learn. They don't want to be called on by SDR, they don't want to be harassed at a booth. They actually want to learn by doing things hands-on. Developers also learn by taking classes or workshops or guided content. So there's another really effective way to learn. And you can think about, this often happens at online workshops. You can do them in person at different events and people walk away accelerated learning and being able to walk away using the product and understanding how to do it. They learn from each other so often in architecture sessions, in whiteboarding sessions with their peers or colleagues who they know and love. They'll also learn in settings like this. And then finally, hackathons are a great way to learn our folks, John loves hackathons. So big round applause for MLH who put on this event.

And again, this is a really effective way of learning because you give them the tools, you give them the technologies, you give them actual problems to solve, and then it's fun because you get prizes, you get awards for doing it. It's a great way of learning. These are the ways developers actually want to learn. And you notice it's not leads. It's not just throwing sales reps at people, it's actually learning by doing it. And this also means that the way we need to communicate about this is different. So here is an example of an engaged developer funnel and the way of thinking about it. So first you want developers to know the basics. They have to know when to use the technology, kind of how it works, accomplish simple tasks, knowing when and when not to use it. Now this is important because for every technology, there are suitable applications and there are things you should never, ever use it for because you will fail like 90% of the use cases for AI today.

So if you teach people when to use a technology and what it's good for, they'll be successful. And if we teach them when not to use it, they won't misapply it and they won't recommend other people use it for projects where they can't be successful. And then making sure the technology is top of mind is also important. So having some touch points or re-engagement where they can see the technology, they can continue to engage on it. As an example of how we applied this at Neo four J, for us knowing the basics was using Graph Academy and learning a course, which is our online free or using Aura, which is the free cloud version of our product for knowing when to use it and when not to use it. We consider people who take in an advanced course intermediary or Advanced Graph Academy course as knowing when and when not to use it or running a certain number of queries in Aura where we actually measure what they're doing and do unique queries.

And then finally, top of mind was clicking on an email, reading our newsletter, coming to our community forums, all those activities. And when they meet all three of these principles, they're consiDevReld an engaged developer. And there's a bunch of ways now that we have a categorization for what an engaged developer is, and we have specific metrics around how to measure it, which would probably be different for your business than ours, but you can see how it's a general framework you can apply. Then you can look at how you can increase the number of engaged developers for the business in a targeted way. So one way would be getting more acquisition. So if somebody doesn't know the basic, doesn't know when to use it and isn't top of mind and they appear in the engaged developer funnel, now they're an acquired developer. And you could do this by getting more people into the funnel, by reaching out to different communities, by promoting in meetups, those will all get you acquisition progression would be if they know the basics and now you're helping them to know when to use it.

Re-engagement would be they already know how to use it and when not to use it, but you haven't seen them for a while. So maybe they've dropped off your radar or they've stopped using the technology and maybe at a future job they might apply it. Product education would be it's top of mind. So they're showing up in your marketing signals, but they've never actually done something that shows that they're an expert in the products. That's an education activity. And then if you're maintaining them, then you can improve the overall number of engaged developers long-term. Okay. Now with this framework in mind, now you can start to have discussions with different people in your organisation. One example of people who you can talk to about this is your board of directors who regularly chats with their board of directors for their company. Not many people in this company.

Now, this is one thing which I learned the hard way from the previous example I gave of failure is every company where I've taken a DevRel job since then I've had interviewed with and had a relationship with the CEO and leadership. And this is something extremely important. If you can't explain to these people about what you're doing and what the impact is, there's no possible way you can contribute to the long-term success of the organisation. And this engaged developer funnel actually was something that the CEO is passionate about. Actually, this isn't our CEO, this is our CEO, but it's something which he can actually talk to the whole organisation and he can explain what the contribution of DevRel is to getting engaged developers, how we're doing to hit the targets. It's actually a company wide metric for improving the number of engaged developers. And something which every good tech CEO who I've worked for knows is that if every deal starts with a passionate, engaged developer, if you actually look into it, it's not the contact in Salesforce.

It's not even maybe the person in Marketo who you're tracking, but there's somebody who's really, really passionate about your technology at the company. They're championing it. They're the one behind the deal on the customer side, and that's your engaged developer, which em and which all these folks in the C-suite, that's the person who they want to see and they want to get more of those people so they can improve the throughput of their company. And then hopefully, and this is an actual slide, I've redacted some of the information from our company. This was in our quarterly all Hands for the first quarter this year, we had a target for a number of engaged developers we were going to hit. We had a couple sources for it. And then our Graph Academy specifically was over twice what the target was. And this is something which is easy for developer relations to control because it's something where it's education, it's content for developers, it it's a way of driving more education to the product. And you can see year over year we're actually driving growth and scale to the company in a way which influences the sales numbers.

And we will eventually get to the next slide. So hopefully we're not getting chased by metrics from other teams like the marketing funnel, being responsible for directly attributing customers and sales because those are all, in my opinion, anti-patterns for success with DevRel. And hopefully we can actually drive to success by filtering and pulling the good parts out of the engaged developer funnel to improve the quality and what we're doing for our organisations. So thank you guys very much for coming to my talk on the Engaged Developer funnel. And I intentionally left a little bit of extra time at the end so we could do q and a with the audience and kind of talk a bit more about what you guys are doing now for this q and a format, you can ask a question, but first you have to tell a story about what you're doing in your company, and it can be either a story of success or a story of failure. So anybody have any comments, questions, or things wish they want to chat about with the rest of us DevRel professionals?

And while I kind of teed up a big ask for everybody, we do have a mic in the back for folks who want to chat and have a question. And I think that in my experience, being able to talk to and have conversations with the executive stakeholders is very important. Now, what I'd really like to see is not only us finding ways where we can come up with the right message and the right metrics for folks, but also better education of the C-Suite. I think that every company, especially tech companies, relies heavily upon developer engagement. They all understand it's important. They get told by their investors. Actually, we recently got a big investor who asked us what were our metrics and how were we contributing to developer relations success because they wanted that as if somebody putting money into the company. And if the board of directors is getting asked that and they don't know how to answer, then we fundamentally have an education problem at the C-suite. So I'd love to see more C-level people sitting at conferences like this Deral Khan. So anybody want to raise their hand in, yeah, share a story and ask a question?

Audience member 1:

Great. My name is Chaan and I'm an AI founder and we're building a marketplace of monetized MCP servers. So we found a way to monetize MCP. And so the question that I have is that we're just starting out and we have some ideas around our go-to market and the target user groups, but we have to kind of figure it out. And so we need DevRel to be not just engaging with developers, but also being part of the go-to-market strategy of figuring out which developers we should even engage. And I'm curious if you had any thoughts about that.

Stephen: Yeah. Okay. So it's a great question and congrats and thanks for sharing the story of your company, giving a big round of applause. Okay. And I'm going to preface this by saying I think it's really important at different stages of the company that you think about and you look at develop relations in different ways. So for startups, often a developer advocate or somebody running DevRel is an early hire because that's your first and most effective go-to market. You have a new product, you're spreading by word of mouth, you're getting folks excited about it. And often even leadership like the CTO or somebody in the C staff ends up serving that role as quote developer advocate and being out there and talking to prospective customers. Also, when you're a small company, a startup, the people you talk to are much, much closer to the buyer. So I think in your case with MCP servers, especially since it's a new tech, a lot of teams are adopting it.

They would actually have to push and be the buying persona in the organisation as well because there's not a big infrastructure team which is going to suddenly buy it or there's not an executive who's going to sponsor it. So in your case, I think that the alignment between DevRel and go to market is higher and you can actually roll them into a marketing motion because you're buying persona and your developer persona is closer. Now, as you hit a larger company, if you're doing around 700 people around a hundred million a RR, then what you're going to see is you're going to see that your influencers are typically not your buying persona. So there's kind of this split, and most folks in DevRel I would say, fall into that category where they're in that size company or a little bit larger unless you're in a startup situation.

And that's the case where applying the typical marketing funnel and metrics is quite challenging because your buying persona and your developer have now split. And then when you get to very large, so I thought I was getting told I was out of time. When you get to very large organisations, then you have a different challenge, which is you have to grow communities and grow users at scale. And that's where a lot of the metrics, which the previous speaker and other folks were talking about for the size of your community, alignment with other teams is really important. So it depends on the size of your company and I think in your case there is a very close alignment with the go-to-market motion. Okay, excellent question. I think we have time for one more question and story. Somebody wants to go, yeah,

Audience member 2:

[inaudbile]

And then my boss asked if I could automate it, and I first started trying with the APIs and doing a search on date ranges. So I want to know 30 days, give me the metrics from YouTube, now go to the next API gave you the last 30 days. They all have a different format for date filters. It's a mess. So what I ended up doing is getting only the current value, not a range, but just what are we at today from every single 15 different data points, save all that to a database, and now it's all normalised. I can do a single date query against that row or multiple rows. So it puts all the data in a format where it's really easy to get averages and totals and things you can't do through a rest API. So that's how we're doing metrics. My question is on that chart that you had where you were showing an engaged developer, I'm curious how you measure that at scale with hundreds or thousands of developers. How do you know that they're keeping you top of mind? How do you know that they're engaged? How do you measure

Stephen: That? Great question. Thanks for the story. So let me answer the question and then I'll also pose a challenge for folks to think about the type of metrics they're collecting. So the metrics I showed, they're all collected using BigQuery. They're coming from systems which are relatively under our control, so our cloud-based environments and our training academy. And so it's not a reflection of all the engaged developers. We do have other sources like our community forums. We do a lot of outreach on external platforms, but it's a good proxy for those because they're owned communities, which we can measure and we can track easily. Now, the other thing which I think is we're thinking about is the type of metrics I'm talking about for things where at their high engagement activities where folks are learning their firing queries, they're actually doing things you can track versus metrics where you're attract results of how many views are we getting, how many attendees are we getting, how many folks are coming to our platforms?

The former, like an engaged metric, I think is much more valuable to the C-suite because those people are the folks who are potentially luminaries and champions and folks who they're going to see in sales deals and accounts down the road. What you're tracking is valuable but not as meaningful up the chain. It's hard to just support a DevRel organisation and the costs and the investments on that purely off an ever increasing scale of we're getting more visibility, more attention, more eyeballs, but without the results that correlate with that. Okay. So with that, I want to thank everyone for coming to my talk here.