Resource Hub
Product MarketingFor Developer Tools
Positioning, messaging, go-to-market planning, sales enablement, and product launches. Everything you need to bring developer products to market. Built on 30 years of experience.
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What is product marketing?
Product marketing is the function that connects what you build to who needs it and why. In developer tools companies, this means understanding both the technical product and the business buyer. It means positioning that is grounded in real differentiation, not aspirational branding.
The core deliverables are a market requirements document, positioning and messaging, a go-to-market plan, sales enablement materials, and customer case studies. Every other marketing activity hangs off these artifacts.
This hub collects everything I know about product marketing from building PMM functions at Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Meta, Twitter, and Supabase. Start with what product marketing actually does, or browse the categories below.
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Product marketing fundamentals
Core concepts of product marketing for developer tools
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.
Why PMMs are coders now
Marketing is communication. Apps are how you communicate at scale to a team that is never in the same room. Three I built, and the one rule that decides whether it was worth it.
Mastering the PMM interview
An LLM can now generate every artifact a take-home test used to measure, with extraordinary detail and high accuracy. So what is the product marketing interview now?
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.
+ 4 more articles in this category
Positioning and messaging
How to position developer products and create messaging that resonates
How marketing supports the PRFAQ process
An LLM can produce a flawless PRFAQ in about ninety seconds. The value of the exercise sits in the argument your organization has about who it is fighting for, and that argument still costs something.
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.
Go-to-market
Launch planning, market entry, and growth strategy
How to run ads for a developer-focused business
The old axiom that "ads don't work on developers" isn't true.
How to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and why that's not good enough
Many of the Founders I work with spend day and night obsessing over their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The ICP is a deep understanding of who your best current customers are, and, as the logic goes, ...
What is solution marketing and why should you care?
Plus, seven tactics to implement solution marketing on your team.
How to produce developer content
If you've been reading my blog posts thus far, you know that a big component of my go-to-market plan is producing massive amounts of great content. This content can take the form of blog posts, white ...
How to build an effective sales enablement strategy for early-stage startups
Sales Enablement is the goals/metrics, content, and accountability measures put in place to ensure that your sales team is armed with everything they need to most effectively do their jobs. In this po...
How to write a go-to-market plan
You've built your market requirements document and your growth plan. Now you need to build your go-to-market plan. What elements go into a solid go-to-market plan? I am a big fan of the "write it down...
+ 4 more articles in this category
Sales enablement
Enabling sales teams to sell developer products
How to write a great developer case study
The Developer Q&A: case studies that developers don't hate
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...
Frequently asked questions
- What is product marketing?
- Product marketing is the function that sits at the intersection of product, sales, and marketing. Product marketers define who the customer is, why the product matters to them, and how to bring it to market. They own positioning, messaging, go-to-market strategy, sales enablement, and competitive intelligence. In developer tools companies, PMMs need to understand both the technical product and the business buyer.
- What does a product marketing manager do?
- A PMM drives customer discovery and research, writes market requirements documents, defines positioning and messaging, builds go-to-market plans, creates sales enablement materials, and mines customer case studies. They work across product, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success. They are the most cross-functional role in any company.
- How is product marketing different for developer tools?
- Developer product marketing requires technical credibility that traditional PMM roles do not. You need to understand APIs, SDKs, developer workflows, and the build-vs-buy decision. Developers are skeptical of marketing claims and will test your product before buying. Your positioning has to be grounded in real technical differentiation, not aspirational branding.
- What is the relationship between product marketing and developer relations?
- Product marketing and developer relations are complementary. DevRel builds trust and community with developers. Product marketing translates that developer understanding into business strategy: positioning, competitive differentiation, and go-to-market plans. The best organizations have PMMs and DevRel working closely together, with DevRel bringing developer insights and PMM turning them into market strategy.
- How do you measure product marketing success?
- Product marketing success shows up in pipeline quality, win rates, sales cycle length, and competitive displacement. Track how well your positioning resonates through customer interviews and win/loss analysis. Measure content influence on deals, sales team confidence scores, and time-to-first-value for new customers. The hardest part is attribution, because PMM work touches every stage of the funnel.
- What is a go-to-market plan?
- A go-to-market plan is the document that coordinates how a product reaches its target customer. It covers positioning, messaging, pricing, channel strategy, launch activities, and success metrics. For developer tools, a GTM plan also includes technical content strategy, community engagement, documentation, and developer experience optimization.
- How do you build positioning for a developer product?
- Start with the customer, not the product. Identify the specific problem you solve, who has that problem, and what alternatives exist. Then define your differentiated value in terms the customer cares about. Good positioning is singular: one target, one primary use case, one core differentiator. The messaging that multiplies from it can address multiple audiences and channels.
- What frameworks and templates are available for product marketing?
- This site includes templates for market requirements documents, go-to-market plans, sales enablement strategies, positioning frameworks, competitive battle cards, and product launch playbooks. Browse the categories above or start with the frameworks and templates collection for downloadable resources.
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