Up and to the Right: The Surprising Science Behind Developer Program Growth

What sets successful developer marketing programs apart in 2023? Managing Partner Gary Gonzalez takes a look at the trends that shaped the industry and what you can learn from them.

Gary Gonzalez

Managing Partner

Best Practices

The developer marketing landscape is defined by program growth and, by extension, where that growth comes from. While 2023 was a turbulent year for the technology industry, on the developer side we saw realignment rather than reduction. The balance of companies spending on developer programs has shifted and budgets have fluctuated based on evolving definitions of success. In short, the best programs are fostering growth and investment in their strategic initiatives while the rest are losing out.

So, how do they do it and what can we learn from them? We sought to answer this question in our session “Up and to the Right: The Surprising Science Behind Developer Program Growth” at the 2023 Developer Marketing Summit.

Let’s take a broad view of the industry to better understand what we saw in 2023. As the leading developer marketing agency, Catchy has the unique benefit of working horizontally with nearly every type of company in the space. We can broadly place these companies into three distinct categories:

Enterprise Technology: Leading technology companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. These companies wrote the developer marketing playbook and have set the gold standard for going to market with technical audiences and operating mature developer programs at a global scale.
Innovation Technology: Scale-ups on the cutting edge of technology. These companies are racing to build developer ecosystems around new products. Recently, this category has included sectors like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and blockchain.
Legacy Technology: Large organizations from various complex industries like banking, telecommunications, and manufacturing. These companies have strategically decided to open their ecosystems to developers for the first time to stay relevant in an increasingly digital world.

This cross-section of client engagements gives us a broad view of investment and budget allocation across the industry. Furthermore, Catchy operates a proprietary developer marketing benchmarketing system to track marketing spend of 30 leading developer programs. Information from this system typically informs competitive analyses for our clients but also allows us to track program budgets year-over-year with a high degree of accuracy.

Using trends from this data and cross-referencing it against the spending levels we see with our clients, we were able to paint a compelling picture of what happened in 2023:

Enterprise Technology companies saw an average YoY decrease in developer marketing spend of 11%
Innovation Technology companies rearranged but the category stayed at a consistent level (hot technologies like AI and ML rose while sectors like blockchain and Web3 dropped)
Legacy Technology companies saw a YoY increase in developer marketing spend of 36%

These findings left us with two main questions:

What factors explain the macro trend differences between Enterprise Technology organizations (increase) and Legacy Technology companies (decrease)?
What did successful organizations in all three categories do to grow their developer marketing programs?

The Macro Trend

2023 was the first year we’ve ever seen developer program growth for Legacy Technology Companies outstrip the incumbents in the Enterprise Technology space. Interviews with our clients and colleagues in the space revealed five main reasons this macro trend flipped in 2023:

Enterprise Technology Organizations	Legacy Technology Companies
Market leaders focused on efficiency Cut costs or die mentality Developer is old and routine Large decentralized programs ROI is done at a tactic level	Market followers playing catch-up Innovate or die mentality Developer is new and exciting Small agile programs ROI done at a program level

Success Factors

Even though Legacy Technology saw the most growth, there were individual programs that succeeded across every category in the industry. We looked at what specifically these companies did to outgrow their developer programs relative to their peers. Further information from our interviews found three shared success factors:

Leading with the Developer

Growth programs focused on meeting developer needs along every step of the learn, build, grow journey. These programs focused less on the individual tactics and more on meeting developers where they were.

Struggling programs focused on going to market with individual tactics, developing initiatives unattached to broader objectives around community and demand generation.

Defined Roles and Responsibilities

Growth programs also had a clear delineation of responsibilities between distinct functions, like developer marketing, developer relations, engineering, product, sales and anything else necessary to their developer ecosystem. When these teams had clear definitions of their goals, objectives, and success metrics, barriers to progress came down.

Struggling programs often had blurred lines with their organization. Typically the “developer team” was seen as a catch-all department that could handle everything from top-of-funnel awareness to community and evangelism work for existing customers. Breakdowns came from unrealistic expectations and underprepared teams.

Unified Measurement Framework

What gets measured matters. Growth programs tied developer program activity to measurable KPIs that impacted their core business objectives. When the economy was booming, teams would ease up on tying activity to metrics. In a more uncertain economic environment, those teams struggled to demonstrate the value of their developer program to internal audiences.

Here are a few common metrics successful programs used to measure the impact of their activities across the developer journey:

Share of voice
Developer qualified leads
Developer acquisition cost
Developer satisfaction scoring
Developer lifetime value

Adapt to Achieve Growth

The macro business environment is unpredictable and ever-changing. While you can’t control everything, you can learn to change course quickly when necessary. When in doubt, stick to the fundamentals and follow the success metrics we’ve seen across the industry: start with your audience in mind, be clear in your roles and responsibilities, and tie everything you do back to business performance. Programs that adapt to achieve growth will always have a place in the developer marketing landscape.

Need to get your developer marketing program on track? Get in touch!