From Data to Strategy: A Holistic Approach to Building and Scaling Your Developer Program

How can you ensure the core components of your developer program work together to drive measurable success? Senior Strategist Ziwei Chen shares data-driven insights and best practices for building comprehensive developer marketing strategies.

Data-driven strategies are crucial to the success of any developer program. But before we discuss the methodologies for building them, we have to clear up a few misconceptions about what they are and what inputs they require.

First, a plan is not a strategy. A plan is a decision on how to get from point A to point B. You need more content to support developers in your ecosystem, so you come up with a few topics and assign writers to work on them. A strategy takes the bigger picture into consideration, understanding where points A and B come together and how they relate to all other points in the equation.

To develop a strategy, you leverage data, organize it into a framework, and use that framework to build a comprehensive approach to your content that supports your objectives. Initial data can take many forms depending on what’s available to you. In-depth metrics, advanced statistics, and complex modeling are often not required.

Collecting and Analyzing Data

The data you collect to inform a developer program isn’t just numbers. It gives you an informed picture of the broader landscape your program will exist in, as well as an early indication of the needs and preferences of the developers in your ecosystem. It includes both the numerical data pulled from your marketing tactics and the qualitative data collected from your stakeholders.

Here are a few examples of the types of data you can use:

Quantitative Data	Qualitative Data	Proxy Data
Impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, views, open rate	Stakeholder interviews and user interviews	Create a scoring system using 1-5 ratings
Likes, comments, shares, followers, stars, average time	Social mentions and product reviews	Assume a baseline
Registrations, downloads, API usage, forks	User-generated content (UGC)	Create a variable

After you collect the data that’s most relevant to your program and objectives, the next step is organizing this data in a way that will help you derive meaning from it. Useful insights are often generated through relatively simple displays that give context to the numbers you’re looking at.

The four pillars of data visualization can be a helpful starting place:

You can consider each pillar according to the different objectives of your program (or the specific insights you hope to gain) to help shape your initial thinking. For example, you can compare your engagement data against industry averages, create a composition showing scoring data from qualitative inputs, or track the relationships of content coverage to developer retention over time.

Understanding Data Through Strategic Frameworks

Now that you’ve collected and organized your data, you’re ready to start putting it to use, turning data into strategy through a strategic framework.

Turning data into strategy through strategic frameworks:

The framework you use will depend on your program, the problems you’re trying to solve, and the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. There are endless possibilities here, and it may take some initial research (or industry expertise) to find a solution that best fits your program.

To demonstrate, we’ll continue to explore an example focused on creating new content to support developers in an ecosystem.

Here are a few key questions we’ll consider as we approach the data:

• What types of content does our audience need from us?

• What pieces of content should we prioritize and who are they for?

• How can all of our content work together to support our developer experience and broader program goals simultaneously?

Framework: Developer Journey Map

The Developer Journey Map is a structured approach to enhancing the developer experience, mapping out the key stages a developer will go through from initial discovery, to learning and building, and eventually to advocating for your product or service.

In this case, you can view the Developer Journey Map by content type to gain an understanding of how your content supports the needs of developers in your ecosystem and where the gaps are in your coverage. Pairing a content audit heat map with the framework will give you the best possible view of where you’re at and what you might need to do next.

Note: In this example, the initial data comes from your existing content mix (what types of content you have, what topics your content covers, and what questions it answers for developers in your ecosystem).

Here’s the progression of the Developer Journey Map over time, starting with the framework, adding in existing content by stage, and using a content audit heat map to demonstrate the strength of coverage:

After the heatmapping has been completed, you’ll notice that insights are relatively easy to find thanks to the structure provided by the selected framework:

• Sufficient content exists to support developers through the discover, evaluate, learn, and build stages, but very little supports developers beyond those stages.

• Content coverage is poorly balanced with a strong presence in some areas (like docs) but a weak presence in others (like video).

Strategy: Developer Content Backlog

At this point, you could use these insights to inform action: We’ll create content about topics A, B, and C, and put this content into formats X, Y, and Z. However you’ll likely get better (and more sustainable) results by creating a strategic output that you and your internal stakeholders can reference. A source of truth for your content strategy that addresses your program objectives.

Leaning on the insights from your content audit, findings from the framework exercise, and knowledge you’ve gained about the developers in your ecosystem in the data collection phase, you can create a backlog of content that dictates exactly what types of content are needed, where it fits into the developer journey, and how it contributes to your program objectives.

This solution allows you to prioritize the highest-impact content that will most effectively support developers on their journey with your product or service.

Here’s an example of how it could come together:

Building and Scaling Comprehensive Developer Programs

There are endless ways to bring this data-driven approach to life depending on what you’d like to achieve. Data can come from a range of quantitative and qualitative inputs (depending on what’s available and what’s relevant), frameworks can include anything from the Developer Journey Map to the Catchy Developer Program Framework, and strategies can be developed from the codified insights and tacit knowledge you gain throughout the process.

Building and scaling any developer program is an iterative process. As you start developing strategies to fulfill your program objectives, you may notice that your data is incomplete, that the preferences of your developer audience have changed, or that the landscape in which your program operates has changed. It’s critical to continue replicating this data-driven cycle over time, turning new data into updated strategies that drive measurable success, before going back to the drawing board to collect more data.

Developer program success does not come from static marketing tactics. It takes a holistic approach to build strategies that will grow, change, and adapt over time to meet your audience at each step of their journey.

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