The Developer Marketing Flywheel is a roadmap for developer marketing practitioners on how to build successful programs: what needs to get done, when to do it, and how to measure the results.
Discovery is the starting point for this roadmap, where you’ll build your strategy by figuring out the core principles of product-market fit. This is ultimately what gets the entire flywheel in motion!
In this post, we’ll explore the first phase of Discovery: Stakeholder Interviews.
Building a developer marketing program is a tall order and figuring out where to start can feel incredibly overwhelming. But don’t worry - there’s good news! In our experience, 80% of the initial information you need exists in the minds of the key stakeholders within your product ecosystem. Spending time speaking with customers, engineers, product managers, and sales staff will help you quickly form hypotheses on how to crack the market.
Before you start, you’ll need to consider how you can turn these conversations into something tangible. Data-driven marketing requires data, after all.
We recommend coding your interviews to accomplish this. Coding is the process of turning qualitative interviews into quantitative data using themes. If you’re curious about how this works, check out this free guide from Delve.
Ask stakeholders about the product, the customers, and everything in between. The questions are limitless, but here are a few that can help you get started:
Look for themes in the responses to these questions and start to track how often these themes come up with different stakeholder groups. This process will naturally lead to insights that you can use to start building your strategy.
For example, here’s the results of stakeholder interviews for a company whose product is used by cloud architects. Coded interviews showed that internal stakeholders in the marketing and sales team viewed security as a key product feature. But similar interviews with customers showed that they were much more concerned with performance. They already knew security was a key feature and didn’t need to hear more about it.
With these insights, the company will have a better understanding of how to build their messaging when they go to market.
Stakeholder interviews can inform the initial direction of your developer marketing strategy, but you’ll need more for a full picture of your product-market fit. Up next in our Developer Marketing Flywheel series, we’ll examine what you can gain from Secondary Research.
Read our entire Developer Marketing Flywheel Series:
