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Developer Marketing Developer Communities Developer Relations Product adoption

7 December 2023 8 min read


EMBRACING YOUR OWN TEAM’S WORKING STYLE TO MAKE GREAT CONTENT

Developer Marketing

TOM BRUINING

Read More

 1. Strategy, ethos and tools - Content & guest posting opportunities
    1. Values & ethos as a source of content
       1. Questions
    2. Strategy as a source of content
       1. Questions
    3. The software they use as a source of content & guest posts
       1. Questions
 2. Using the development lifecycle as a source of content, and a content
    strategy
    1. 1. Discovery
    2. 2. Design
    3. 3. Development
    4. 4. Testing & Q/A
    5. 5. Release
    6. 6. Maintenance
 3. Embracing their ways of working to collaborate more effectively
    1. Improving prioritization of content generation
    2. Getting their input effectively

Coming up with content ideas and then getting your engineering team to support
the development of that content can be tricky for developer marketers. 

As the former Head of Data for HelloFresh, UK and a Lead Engineer at a B2B
EdTech company, I explore how you can tap into your engineering team’s strategy,
the development lifecycle and the team’s existing ways of working to create
great content. 

I’m now viewing my experience as an engineer through a marketing lens as the
co-founder of HowdyGo, an interactive product demo tool for developer marketing
teams.

Hopefully, you’ll find ways to collaborate more effectively with your
engineering team and get them excited about contributing to your company’s
marketing strategy. 

To keep things practical, I’ll explain the high-level idea behind each section,
and share a series of questions you can use (almost) verbatim, to work with your
team.


STRATEGY, ETHOS AND TOOLS - CONTENT & GUEST POSTING OPPORTUNITIES

Source

Engineers tend to be opinionated, it’s a meme these days (See above). 

Those opinions are developed throughout their careers and they often define the
strategy, values, and approach that they use to build the product that
ultimately, you’re responsible for marketing. 

By embracing those opinions and using them as a source of inspiration for great
content you can start to develop your brand’s position.


VALUES & ETHOS AS A SOURCE OF CONTENT

Explaining your team’s values & ethos to your prospects is a great source of
brand awareness content, particularly when you start to get into value-driven
purchasing decisions. These value-driven purchasing decisions are at least
partially why there’s been a proliferation of Commercialized Open Source
software products.

An example of this approach is Flagsmith, an open source feature flagging tool,
where they use their founder’s Open Source First mindset as an opportunity for
brand awareness. As it allows them to connect with their target audience and
talk about the approach to their product development in a disarming context.


QUESTIONS

 1. Why did you choose this commercialization model for our product?
 2. What motivated you to solve this problem?
 3. Why did you decide to work for X?
 4. When did you decide you were going to commercialize this product (COSS/open
    source) and why did you make that decision?


STRATEGY AS A SOURCE OF CONTENT

The team’s immediate strategy, both what’s to come and what’s already been
implemented is a great source of content. 

By exploring their strategy, and helping to elevate the conversation above the
practical implementation you’ll be able to find new opportunities for both
content and guest posting opportunities.


QUESTIONS

 1. What were the team’s OKRs for the quarter - what has been the most
    interesting thing that’s been implemented?Note: Lift the conversation up a
    level and ask them to focus on the Why behind the change, rather than the
    What they’ve changed.
 2. What are the systems, processes and values that the team has in place to
    achieve their OKRs?Note: From a content perspective, other engineering teams
    can be very interested in how other teams operate.
    
 3. Are we integrating with any tools for our users? Why did we make that
    decision?Note: Integrations are great opportunities for guest posts on other
    company’s websites. As an example, Hubspot accepts guest post pitches for
    their Developer blog. 


THE SOFTWARE THEY USE AS A SOURCE OF CONTENT & GUEST POSTS

This type of content can help you guest post on company blogs that may otherwise
be “out of reach”. By exploring how your team operates and the software they
use, you’ll often find that they rave about some software and have incorporated
it into their ways of working.

As an example, an organization like PagerDuty shares “Best Practices”, which can
be improved with real examples from engineering teams.


QUESTIONS

 1. Are there any products you use, that you absolutely cannot live without, how
    has it changed the way you work?Note: This can be great for SEO / Link
    Building if you provide testimonials or if you write long-form content for
    their blog. Look specifically for smaller/earlier-stage dev products and
    tools if your goal is backlink opportunities.
 2. Looking at Question 2 (Which systems, processes and values have you used to
    achieve your OKRs?),  from “Strategy as a source of content”, did they
    mention any software that could be added to your target list of guest
    posts?Note: A company like PagerDuty can be interested to hear about how
    your team handles their on-call schedule for instance. It’s a great
    opportunity for a backlink.


USING THE DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE AS A SOURCE OF CONTENT, AND A CONTENT STRATEGY

The development lifecycle is a great source of content

The development lifecycle is a process that every engineering team follows in
some form. Both your internal engineering team, as well as your prospect’s
development lifecycle. 

By creating content that covers the entire “development lifecycle” you’ll be
helping your prospects answer key questions they’ll need to answer at some stage
during the adoption of your product.

You can use the development lifecycle as a source of questions to brainstorm
with your own engineering team to identify content ideas that will help your
prospects too. Let’s walk through the lifecycle step by step and offer a few
different questions that you can ask.


1. DISCOVERY

 1. How/When do people discover they will need our product?
 2. What aspects about our product make them consider us, more than any other
    solution - whether that’s built in-house or one of your competitors?
 3. What is our prioritisation process for inbound changes?
 4. How do we handle inbound issues (Open-source projects primarily)?Note: An
    active issue/resolution process on GitHub is a primary point of
    consideration when you’re assessing a tool as an engineer. Make sure yours
    is a positive environment.


2. DESIGN

> “You can create articles of detailed technical investigations you are doing
> and convert them into pieces of content. Benchmarking content is super
> valuable since it's really time-consuming to do the work yourself” - CTO &
> Co-founder, Daniel Engelke, howdygo.com

 1. What architectural decisions do people need to answer before selecting us?
 2. What is it about our product that specifically makes it easier for us to
    implement than our competitors?
 3. What is complex about someone trying to do this in-house?
 4. Have you made any specific decisions related to reliability, resilience,
    security or data privacy that make our product stand out?
    1. Depending on your product, things like GDPR and SOC2 compliance might be
       very interesting topics to write about.
    2. Writing about resilience from a technical perspective can also be very
       interesting. (Even, in some cases, admitting to a mistake and describing
       your recovery actions can be interesting…)
    3. Writing about infrastructure can be interesting, and can have the
       potential for guest posts on AWS, Azure and GCP blogs as well as a
       variety of other company blogs.


3. DEVELOPMENT

 1. What is it about the development experience (DX) that makes the product good
    to work with? (Example: Do you offer a typescript package?)
 2. Have you done anything recently to improve the DX with the product?


4. TESTING & Q/A

 1. How do we make it easier to test and quality assure our product when
    incorporated into our customer’s code base?
    1. Do we offer mock libraries for popular tools like Jest, pytest, etc?
 2. If we have an Open Source product, is the code base fully tested?
    1. If not, are we close? - this could be an announcement.


5. RELEASE

> There are automated tools to list all major changes and if they are new
> features or bug fixes based on the GitHub PRs and/or tickets, which can be
> relatively easily restructured for external consumption - Daniel Engelke

 1. Could we create a “Release” checklist for our product?
 2. Does our product do anything specific to make it easier to release it?


6. MAINTENANCE

> “Quality of published post mortems is a really good sign that a product will
> be reliable. Compare Cloudflare's post-mortem on Okta vs Okta’s own. 
> Cloudflare’s explanation, by comparison, generated a huge amount of positive
> support and discussion.” - Daniel Engelke, CTO & Cofounder

 1. How are product updates handled?
 2. Do we have specific policies around product updates, what is our support
    period?
 3. Do we have on-call engineering support, is that something we consider
    noteworthy in this product space?
 4. The existence of a well-managed and coordinated status page can improve
    confidence in the reliability of a tool that an engineer is assessing.
 5. How do we help to minimise regression issues?
 6. How do we handle major version releases of our product?


EMBRACING THEIR WAYS OF WORKING TO COLLABORATE MORE EFFECTIVELY

At the end of the day, engineers are supposed to be developing your product, not
contributing to marketing. Unfortunately, they are also in a position as a
source of knowledge and understanding that is often unmatched within your
company, so you need to find ways to collaborate with them.

There are two challenges to address in this environment:

 1. Prioritization
 2. Getting their input effectively


IMPROVING PRIORITIZATION OF CONTENT GENERATION

Here are a few ideas on how you can help your team prioritize content generation
without it feeling like a complete divergence from their primary
responsibilities:

 1. Don’t ignore their sprints: Engineering teams almost always work in sprints,
    so if you don’t have story points assigned to the task, good luck! Work with
    their manager to get it incorporated into their sprint.
 2. Asynchronous working: Find ways for them to contribute to marketing
    collateral asynchronously. Most engineers need to work on tasks when they
    feel like they’re “clicking” with the problem. Disrupting their day with a
    meeting can be a burden, so finding ways to work asynchronously is super
    valuable.
 3. Use recruitment and your company profile to increase priority and get your
    engineering managers on board: Technical marketing content is fantastic as a
    recruitment tool. I used to look at development blogs to understand if the
    company I was joining was, well, good. You can capitalize on their
    recruitment needs to improve the priority of this content.
 4. Tie personal growth/progression to marketing content: If you have an
    engineer who is interested in presenting a professional image on LinkedIn
    this can be a great opportunity for them and allows you to tap into their
    existing engineering network.Of equal importance, some engineering teams
    look at domain expertise at a senior individual contributor level as a
    promotional requirement. It’s worthwhile investigating what the promotion
    track looks like for your engineering teams.


GETTING THEIR INPUT EFFECTIVELY 

 1. Don’t make them stress about creating a perfect “ready-to-go” article: Get
    them to focus on the salient facts, you can always improve the writing style
    and restructure the content afterwards.
 2. Don’t stress too much about not understanding the content: If the structure
    feels confusing to you, it’ll feel confusing to someone who is reading this
    content without any context. So feel free to restructure and rework so that
    it flows.
 3. Give them help to make “creative assets” that support the content:
 4. Things like diagrams can be generated quickly using “Mermaid” and ChatGPT
    these days. They add a lot of depth to articles and can be relatively quick
    to produce.
 5. Interactive product demos can also be great assets to incorporate into your
    content because they can record the application doing what they’re
    describing and then pass it to you to clean up.
 6. Screenshots and code blocks always go down well.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Written by:

TOM BRUINING

Tom is the co-founder of HowdyGo, an interactive product demo software.
Previously Head of Growth at a $20m ARR startup and Head of Data & BI for the
UK's largest meal-kit provider.

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