21 articles
Developer Marketing
Articles and guides about Developer Marketing.
Marketing to machines
ChatGPT recommending your product and a coding agent installing it are two different outcomes. Measuring mentions alone can hide whether coding agents can use what you sell.
What developer events are actually for
Every year somebody asks whether the event budget is worth it, and every year it is argued with the wrong numbers. The case got stronger this year.
DevRel is marketing. Stop pretending otherwise.
Everyone who wears the company t-shirt is doing marketing, including the people who insist they are not. What developer relations gives up by holding that line is bigger than a job title.
Your changelog is a marketing channel
A blog post is easy to fake. A dated record of what you shipped, week after week, is not. That is why the least-loved page you own is doing the most work right now.
If Picks and Shovels had one more chapter
I published the book in 2025. The chapter I would add now is about marketing to agents, and the part I got wrong is more interesting than the part I would add.
Developer marketing needs pi-shaped marketers
T-shaped worked when one deep skill plus cross-training was enough. With unlimited tokens and shrinking headcount, a marketer can genuinely excel at more than one thing, and in developer marketing the second leg is coding.
The first marketing hire survival guide
You were hired to do marketing. The job is actually to work out whether the company is in customer discovery or customer creation, because everything you do next depends on which one it is.
Everything is cheap
When it costs almost nothing to build something, you start to devalue your own time. I built my own Granola for no reason at all. Knowing which builds are worth it is the skill that matters now.
Is PMM going to survive the AI reckoning?
The role will survive. Most of the people currently in it might not. Not because AI is good at product marketing, but because the essence of the job was never the artifacts.
Everything's fake
You can't tell who's real anymore. The person on the other end could be a dog, a cat, a robot, or a human. The thing that's still expensive is a handshake.
The content that can't be generated
I ran several experiments with AI generated content this last year. They all sucked. Here are the three kinds of content that still work, because they can't be generated.
The complete developer marketing guide: selected excerpts from Picks and Shovels
Selected passages from Picks and Shovels, arranged in the order a developer marketing program actually runs.
How to write a great developer case study
The Developer Q&A: case studies that developers don't hate
How to run ads for a developer-focused business
The old axiom that "ads don't work on developers" isn't true.
Why you need a training program
Depending on the nature of your developer-focused cloud company, you may have any number of these problems: * You have an open-source version of your cloud product and have no idea who your open-sou...
The 12 types of content that work for developers
I write a lot about content. I've provided a few tips on how to create content, a process for producing content within your Developer Relations team (hint: it's not just Developer Advocates writing st...
The power of storytelling in developer marketing
Gather 'round, and let's tell some stories. I've written posts about what the various functions in developer relations do. I've also written some practical posts about the mechanics of running events,...
How to build an amazing developer community, from scratch!
If I had a dollar every time an exec or CEO asked me to "build a developer community," I'd have a lifetime supply of dollar bills and a headache from rolling my eyes. Not to contradict the title of my...
Seven tips for building your content strategy
I am often asked by founders and DevRel leaders where they should focus their content efforts. I've done this work countless times at numerous companies, big and small. Take it from me. Here are seven t...
Digital marketing for product-led growth (PLG) developer products
Product-led growth (PLG) enables you to focus your entire customer-facing SaaS business on a common goal: get people to sign up for your product. Once someone has signed up for your product, then a sa...
What does Product Marketing do?
The ringleaders of the circus
