How to Build a Best-in-Class Developer Experience: A Developer Marketing Perspective

What makes for a best-in-class developer experience? In this post, guest contributor Kelly Little (AI Developer Marketing Director at Graphcore) explains why developer experience should be front-and-center in your developer marketing strategy.

As the technology landscape evolves with the progression of AI, it has become increasingly clear that developers are at the heart of machine intelligence innovation. This includes researchers, scientists, and engineers, who act as influencers and decision-makers in adopting new technologies to advance the next generation of AI.

Developer experience (DX) plays a crucial role in this decision-making process. DX is a broad discipline encompassing a full range of developer marketing and developer relations activity—everything from product design to documentation to developer portals. These components work together to create a cohesive experience; for example, insights from developer relations can inform your product roadmap, while marketing efforts can help your innovations resonate with developers.

At Graphcore, we design specialized AI compute to enable innovators to unlock the next breakthroughs in machine intelligence. I’m fortunate to work with leaders in the AI field and collaborate with teams—from Field Engineering to Solution Architects to Applied AI—where enhancing DX is a primary objective. I draw on their expertise to transform deeply technical customer feedback into well-informed marketing strategies that help support the developer journey.

At CatchyCon in Seattle, I was invited to join a panel discussion exploring the rise of the developer experience: what it means, why it’s important, how to enhance it, and what value it brings to technology companies. In this blog, I’ll share my perspective on what makes an overall best-in-class developer experience—of which marketing is a key component.

What is Developer Experience and Why Does It Matter?

“Developer Experience, or DX, refers to the ease, efficiency, and satisfaction developers experience while building, testing, and deploying software solutions. While UX caters to end-users, DX focuses on the needs and workflows of technical users such as developers, engineers, and programmers.” Tom Williams, Prioritizing DX: A User-Centric Approach to Technical Products

Developers are always looking for tools and resources that make it easier to perform essential tasks. But from a developer marketing standpoint, DX is also about delivering on the promise of your value proposition to developers.

When we’re tempted to reach for buzzwords like “easy to use,” is that true? When we say “frictionless,” is that true? When we claim products will “supercharge your development workflow,” is any of that actually true?

The purpose of the developer experience is to represent and advocate for the developer community. Developers are the customers, the influencers, and the trailblazers driving innovation through technology. Therefore, implementing a good developer experience is not just important—it’s absolutely non-negotiable. DX acts as a crucial bridge between marketing and the developer community. It’s at the very core of how you can attract, grow, and retain your developer community. Without it, you’ll lose developers fast.

What Makes for a Good Developer Experience?

There are many elements that contribute to a good developer experience. Obviously, technical aspects such as having a great API, smooth IDE, or clean code play a fundamental part, but let’s look at it through a developer marketing lens.

• Practical Content: It’s stating the obvious, but content must be genuinely helpful and insightful for developers. It should be mapped across the entire developer journey and not just feed the awareness stage or top-of-funnel engagement. When defining and executing their content plan, marketers should think: What problem does this solve? Will developers learn something new? Will it make their lives easier? What stage of the developer journey does it address?

• Multifaceted Resources: Comprehensive technical documentation is not just about having comprehensive content—it’s also about repurposing content into different formats for maximum utilization. For example, a technical document on a new programming technique might also be useful to developers as a how-to video, a technical blog, a GitHub code example, a tutorial, a Jupyter notebook, or even a webinar.

• Clear Signposting: It’s no good having awesome content and resources if developers don’t know where to find them, and the search process is utterly painful. Think about the end-to-end user journey and how developers navigate not just your website but also your document portal and even your GitHub repos. Consider how they search or filter for information and how content should be mapped to lifecycle stages. Provide clear instructions on where developers can go next and why.

• Rapid Onboarding: Developers want to get right into evaluating, building, and testing. Remove any unnecessary manual setup and annoying configurations, and offer them a free trial for frictionless onboarding. This will get developers into your product fast, speed up time to activation, and deliver instant value.

• Community Collaboration: Provide an open and approachable route for developers to ask questions and learn from your internal support teams and SMEs. Support DevRel and foster a community that helps each other through peer-to-peer collaboration and knowledge sharing—whether that’s via Slack, Discord, Reddit or support forums. And, most importantly, listen to the broader community and celebrate their successes.

A good developer experience is about finding the right balance between leaving developers to their own devices (to “try before they buy” without hammering them to death with sales and marketing) and excessive monitoring to identify barriers where they’d benefit from additional resources (like new documentation, one-on-one support, training workshops, or a dedicated program).

In short, it’s about nurturing and accelerating developers through their journey while giving them the creative freedom to explore in their own time.

Which Companies Stand Out With Great DX?

In the AI world, the companies I have to give a shout-out to include Hugging Face for being a leader in open-source collaboration. They give developers easy access to a wide range of (1 million!) ML models and datasets for building applications. Weights & Biases has the ability to integrate model tracking and visualization with just five lines of code, plus they offer Fully Connected, a community enriched with tons of ML resources. And PyTorch—the most popular ML framework—has an extensive ecosystem of tools and libraries, as well as best-in-class developer documentation.

On the marketing side, establishing broader ecosystem partnerships is crucial to enhancing the developer experience. We’ve integrated and collaborated with these leading players because they embrace open-source culture and provide the tools that AI engineers love, contributing to a better experience for our developers.

I’m fortunate to work with hundreds of talented engineers at Graphcore, so I’ve posed this question to them to see who they’d praise for great DX (but not limited to AI).

Solution Architect

“Personally, I’ve found Apple’s iOS developer resources to be quite decent, considering it’s a huge bunch of APIs in a language I wasn’t previously familiar with, i.e., Swift. They have self-contained code examples for every new API feature, and live-coding walkthrough videos from the annual developer conference are published online.”

Graduate Software Engineer

“I have a lot of opinions on this, but without a doubt, the best DX on the planet goes to Vercel. A few things that make it really stand out: - One-click deployments: It’s as simple as linking up your GitHub repo, and bang, your website is deployed. It’s crazy. You don't need to mess about with configs and they make it easy to get something running on their platform in one click. - Elite UX/Interface: When you want to find something on the dashboard, it is there and clearly placed next to functionalities that are related to it. The ability to do what you want to do without scouring through documentation is IMO the key to DX.”

Research Team Lead

"VS Code. It just works, but it’s also extensively configurable. It allows you to find out what it's doing in the background. Feels like it doesn't force you into its own framework or too strict a worldview.”

If you compare the last two opinions, one engineer favors the high-level/low-code experience while the other benefits from a low-level/granular code environment that gets under the hood.

This reinforces the importance of understanding your audience and recognizing that it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. It really depends on the developer's persona—their role, skillset, what tools they use, frustrations, motivations, and ultimately, what they are trying to achieve.

Where Does Developer Marketing End and DX Begin?

Truthfully, developer marketing never stops—it runs in tandem with developer experience. They both support and nurture each other at every step of the developer journey.

At Graphcore, we had to adapt our approach to developer experience and align our marketing efforts to complement a new user journey. When we launched our first-generation product, we were focused on a more traditional sales-led approach by selling on-prem hardware to customers.

Here’s an example of what the developer journey looked like at the time:

As you can see, it was a manual onboarding process with multiple steps. This meant that the point at which a developer became aware of our technology and the point where a developer could experience our technology were quite far apart.

As the AI market evolved, so did the growing demand for accessible AI compute in the cloud. Therefore, we launched our IPU cloud offering. But to make that successful, we needed to apply a Product-Led Growth (PLG) approach, or as I prefer to see it, a developer-led model to remove unnecessary friction from accessing and evaluating our platform. 

This was a huge cross-team effort that involved Platform Engineering building the new cloud infrastructure, AI Engineering upgrading model code into interactive Jupyter notebooks, and the marketing team developing a Model Garden and driving SEO-optimized content via PLG-based campaigns.

As a result, developers could now launch an IPU-powered notebook in the cloud for a variety of ML models with just one click, moving the needle from the experience stage to the awareness stage and closing that gap.

Within months, we significantly increased our organic traffic and our number of new users.

What we’ve learned is that developer experience really starts at the awareness stage, or as close to it as possible. When developers visit your website and explore your docs, they get a feel for the learning experience. When a developer finds a how-to video on a new programming technique, they’re getting a view into the coding experience. When developers visit your booth and interact with a demo, they’re experiencing your environment firsthand.

But it doesn’t stop at the awareness stage: DX + DevRel + DevMar run together throughout every stage of the PLG flywheel from Evaluate > Activate > Adopt > Adore > Advocate.

By implementing a closely aligned team, you can maintain a strong feedback loop that ultimately informs company goals, product roadmaps, and user growth strategies. This creates success for everyone—including the developer.

What Contributes to Poor DX?

Essentially, it's unhelpful content, hidden resources, poor signposting, painful onboarding, and a lack of community. Don’t let DX be an afterthought—it’s hard to win developers back after a negative experience.

Here are some examples of bad DX from internal engineers at Graphcore: 

Solution Architect

“Lack of any examples and nothing to ease the pain of working out how the author expects a user to get started, especially if it’s a framework with which I want to build something. I don’t know what narrative the author had in mind, but it’s statistically unlikely that’s how I would have done it!”

Technical Lead

“Poor developer experience, in general, equals unintuitive menus, where some things are often hidden away where you would least expect them to be. Good documentation online can make or break the experience. If a user is unable to get a quick answer from just Googling, this can be off-putting.”

Research Team Lead

"Generally, lots of tools say, "Do X, and it just works," but I prefer those that say, "Think of me like X, and your guess will probably work." Reiterating point on—don’t overpromise.

To continue from that last point, it’s super important to portray a truthful developer experience by setting realistic expectations in your marketing messaging. Be clear on your value proposition, benefits, and limitations. Don’t overpromise and cause unnecessary dissatisfaction in your developer audience.

What Role Do People Have in DX?

The role of people in developer experience can vary depending on the organization. Some companies will have dedicated teams that are entirely focused on boosting developer productivity and satisfaction, whereas others, like us, spread that responsibility throughout the company. 

In relation to marketing, I would summarize the role of DX into the four Vs:

It’s not just the job of the Developer Experience Lead or Developer Relations Manager to think DX. If you’re selling to developers, whether they’re building with your technology or are part of your ecosystem, then DX should be deeply ingrained into your organizational culture and mindset.

Examples of people improving DX include a website team improving the menu navigation, an events team planning interactive demos, a software team proposing ideas for documentation, a product support team creating online tutorials, and so on.

Everyone, to some extent, plays a role in DX.

What Metrics Can We Use to Measure DX Performance?

Developer experience can be measured in different ways, but let’s focus on DX metrics that relate to external developers in areas where marketing can help track, support, and enhance results.

• Findability: This metric measures how easily developers can search and locate documentation and resources. With improved findability, developers spend less time searching and more time self-serving. This should be continuously adapted via UX reviews, improved navigation, and building resource hubs that are easily searchable and filterable.

• Onboarding Time: This metric might be measured as the time to reach the “Hello world” stage or how long it takes developers to spin up a functional environment. This can be supported by logical signposting to quick-start guides or delivering campaigns that point to free trials.

• Developer Retention Rate: Measuring new users is a basic metric. However, organizations need to track retention and movement through the entire developer funnel to get a good indication on DevEx. This can be achieved by implementing PLG-based CRM systems to track the pipeline, and live dashboards to measure impact in product improvements and marketing performance.

• Developer Satisfaction: This measures overall experience, satisfaction, and recommendations for improvement through a continuous feedback loop. This can be achieved via developer surveys, net promoter scores (NPS), feedback widgets, community polls, stakeholder interviews, user group studies, etc. 

• Community Engagement: This metric measures the health and growth of your developer community not just in terms of numbers, but also through the level of engagement and activity. This can be tracked through community size, monitoring discussions, frequency of posts, overall sentiment, and even through GitHub engagement insights. 

At Graphcore, we monitored a variety of PLG metrics to measure DX. We created a dashboard to visualize the movement from awareness to advocacy, looking closely at content, channels, and campaigns that made an impact in turning evaluators into adopters.

How Does Developer Experience Drive Business Success?

Ultimately, investing in a positive developer experience results in happier developers, successful business outcomes, and a competitive edge. Enhancing DX and incorporating developer-first marketing strategies will result in:

• Broader Feedback: Providing multiple communication channels for two-way developer feedback will open up more dialogue, constructive reviews, and meaningful insights into how your product should be improved.

• Optimized ROI: Developer feedback can be fed into marketing strategies that focus on priority content, compelling campaigns, targeted events, and curated developer programs that reduce wasted marketing dollars.

• Reduced White-Glove Support: By providing high-quality technical content, code, and resources, developers can self-serve and guide themselves through the development process. They’ll require less input from support teams that provide one-on-one white-glove treatment.

• More Innovation: Developers will become more productive and capable of unlocking new breakthroughs or use cases on your technology, which will, in turn, drive a more competitive edge or broader market fit for your product.

• Improved Efficiency: This isn’t just for external developers to speed up development time or reduce operational costs. It’s also for internal engineers to focus on what really matters when it comes to product improvements, new features, and documentation creation.

• Thriving Community: A strong developer experience will help build a positive and loyal community that fosters peer-to-peer support, advocacy, and collaborative content creation around your product.

• More Revenue: A better product plus positive developer experience equals increased adoption and higher retention rates. It will also result in a higher conversion rate of free-to-paid users, as they expand to deployment and scale up their production workloads.

Today, more than ever, developers call the shots when it comes to the technology that companies use. The role of DX is so fundamental that it can unlock a purchase decision. If done poorly, it can end potential deals and drive them towards competitors instead. 

It’s imperative that tech companies listen to developers, act on their feedback, and keep them happy. Effective marketing strategies look beyond awareness and nurture developer success throughout the entire lifecycle, creating a positive overall developer experience.

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