Caroline Lewko - How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program

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In the 1990s, Java was a young, exciting programming language that made it possible to write portable applications easily. I was overjoyed and spent the better part of the six years after university graduation training, educating, and promoting this world-changing technology to anyone who would listen.

These efforts were given a platform (and at the time an amplifying megaphone) at BEA Systems, the market leader in Java application servers, where I carried the title of Chief Evangelist. Developers, at the time, were seen as fickle, idiosyncratic, and with low influence authority in the IT decision-making structure.

Little did I know that evangelism was how early technology companies were establishing a Developer Relations function. At the time, we were thrilled when developers attended our workshops to acquire new skills or when our articles outlining innovative techniques in Java programming were published in hip trade magazines. Evangelism was, in many respects, fun because while we were spreading essential technology insights, it kept our own knowledge growth curve piqued.

In the following 20 years, developers have become an economic force. Businesses that build products sold to or consumed by developers generated $40B in 2020 annual recurring revenue, putting developers at the center of the multitrillion-dollar IT industry. More than 1200 companies have created commercial products within this landscape, and its growing 19% annually. With more than 20 million professional software engineers, and 250 million knowledge workers transitioning into civilian developers through low-code technology, the influence of developers will be increasingly as important as advertising in the Super Bowl or the reach of TikTok.

Developer Relations has emerged as the professional practice by which organizations build sustainable and endearing relationships with developers in their new role as economic influencers.

The industrys understanding of Developer Relations is in its infancy. Only 24% of the Fortune 500 companies have established developer program management offices, and cursory scans of job boards show DevRel positions available in only the best-funded venture capital technology startups. And, in the companies that Ive invested in, only one third have established DevRel programs even though its always highlighted as essential in the boardroom!

When Caroline Lewko told me that she was combining her and James Partons many years of Developer Relations experience into a book that outlines a recipe for creating, building, and growing a Developer Relations group, I knew that their efforts would have a profound and lasting impact upon marketing, product, and customer success organizations.

Well-run DevRel groups have a significant impact on the bottom line. By reaching developers to facilitate solving their technology problems, businesses can expect a lower customer acquisition cost, lower support costs which improve gross margins, and lower customer churn rates improving the net retention rate.

In Developer Relations, How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Program, Caroline and James provide a blueprint for organizations to build high-performing DevRel organizations.

In Part I: Develop a Common Understanding, they define Developer Relations and articulate how it is different from B2B and B2C techniques by laying out a framework that combines education, marketing, experience, and success, and emphasize the value of the Developer Economy.

The definition of a developer changes with the nature of technology, and with low-code systems making nearly every knowledge worker a developer, there may be up to 500 million reachable professional developers in the coming decade. In Part II: Key Differentiators, Caroline and James provide the constructs necessary to define, segment, and identify different categories of developers, and the companies they work in, which inform the nature of how your marketing and education investments will be made, and the type of monetization strategy you might deploy.

Developers as buyers are more likely to buy from companies implementing a Product-Qualified Lead motion rather than the traditional, sales-heavy Sales-Qualified Lead process. In Part IV: Go-to-Market, Delivering Your Strategy, Caroline and James codify the PQL experience from discovery through activation and scaling. It delves you into the mindset of the developer to help you address key questions that must be addressed at every stage of engagement with developers. Combined with Part III: Alignment on Goals, they also emphasize, whether its a Product-Qualified Lead or a Developer Relations Qualified Lead, the importance of collaborating with the sales and other teams inside your organization.