Developer marketing needs pi-shaped marketers

In her excellent post, Emily Kramer argues for pi-shaped marketers. In this post, I'm going to explain to you why pi-shaped marketing is so important and what it specifically means for developer marketing and developer relations.

What T-shaped was actually for

T-shaped marketers were a thing for a long time. They were the marketers who had deep expertise in one area but could cross-train and do other things across other areas. For example, a product marketer who could moonlight as a growth marketer, help out with social media marketing, and so on. This is a good thing because it allowed companies to get more bang for their buck with their marketing budget.

The world has changed dramatically because the volume of output has increased and because the tools at our disposal are so extraordinary. With unlimited tokens, it is indeed possible for a marketer to excel at more than one thing. And with headcount shrinking, it's even more important to get more out of your people. This is why pi-shaped marketers are so important.

The term comes from the pi symbol. Two legs and a platform above it. The two legs represent depth in more than one area of marketing.

In Picks and Shovels, I referenced the inimitable Dave Kellogg, who decomposes marketing into four pillars:

• product marketing
• demand generation
• corporate communications
• sales development

Kellogg scores marketing leaders 1 to 5 on each pillar, for a maximum of 15. The constraint is the point. Almost nobody is great at all four.

The idea is that a marketer can probably excel in one area, be good enough in a couple of other areas, and probably be weak in another area. For me, I excel at product marketing and am weak at demand generation.

Why developer tools needs two legs and not one

With developer marketing, you need to understand the product and the customer. What that means is that, because the product tends to be technical and the market is so complex, you need marketers who can also use and appreciate developer tools. A lot of problems that I see with developer marketing stem from a marketer who has not used the product nor understands who the customer actually is.

To me, the pi-shaped philosophy with developer marketing and developer relations is that you need to be a very good generalist marketer, potentially even a great product marketer, but you also need to be a pretty good coder.

And things like brand marketing and content marketing all stem from whether or not you have developed the skills as a coder to understand the product for which you work.

At most companies, where the product is intended for non-technical users, the pi-shaped marketing philosophy is:

• product marketing plus brand marketing
• product marketing plus content marketing
• social media marketing plus content marketing

But with developer tools companies, the product and the marketing are intermingled in a way that the pi-shaped marketing philosophy is all about coding.

The pi-shaped marketer is not a generalist

One thing that you need to dispel early on is that being a pi-shaped marketer does not mean that you are a generalist. Yes, the shape of the symbol pi includes this tabletop that implies that you know many things fairly well, and that is true, but you also need to be an expert in a certain area. You also need to develop expertise in coding.

Hiring for it

The challenge with developer marketing has always been hiring. Looking for people that have marketing skills, but also deep technical skills to understand and appreciate the market.

When I interview marketers, I always have someone in product on the interview loop. When I interview product marketers, I also have someone from sales or rev ops on the interview loop. It's important that the product team member on the interview loop conducts a reasonably technical interview. We don't want people going soft on us just because we're in marketing.

We want to understand through the interview process whether a candidate will fully appreciate and understand this customer. We can make a decision after the interview process whether the candidate is weak in coding but strong enough in other areas to overcome it. Having that knowledge up front during the interview process, I think, is essential.

Questions I like to ask include:

• What did you build for yourself lately?
• What is your favorite developer tool or programming language?
• What are some processes you use to build internal tools to make your team move faster?

In the AI era, I think it's very important that all marketers embrace and use AI to its fullest extent. Responsibly, of course, but still to its fullest extent. For us in developer marketing, one aspect of using AI is all about coding and knowing how to use the product well.

The path through the reckoning

I've written before about whether product marketing can survive this AI reckoning, and I believe that becoming a pi-shaped marketer is the path to doing so. I believe that becoming a pi-shaped marketer enables all of us to build the necessary skills that position us to adapt to all the changes that are happening in our industry.