~ 4 min read
DevRel Failures? Maybe Your Marketing and Product Strategies Are Outdated
Developer Relations (DevRel) is often in the intersection of marketing, product and engineering. Undoubtedly, DevRel has been facing a turmoil of changes, layoffs and strategic shifts within startup and companies but maybe it is your product and marketing strategies that are actually outdated and causing customer churn, and overall frustration?
The following are some of my impressions and thoughts from working with founders, devtool companies and startups in the technology space around AI, software engineering, and application security domain.
The old days
In the “old days”, which in this fast-pacing environment of technology startups is basically 4 years ago, we used to follow very concrete playbooks for everything across DevRel, Marketing and Product.
Some examples of these playbooks include:
- Scheduled launch events for product announcements
- The product team filters and caters through a customer-base to hunt for leads for user interviews
Product launch event? sigh you’re already too late
If you’re scheduling launch events for 2 months from now or longer, I’m sorry to tell you but that boat has sailed.
Why are you holding back on your ability to innovate and execute at a fast pace?
You’ve built something out? a prototype, an early access version, a closed beta? It’s ready to launch. Spread the news. Put it on social, get an announcement article published on the blog. Don’t keep this waiting on the launch pad for 2 months.
This is especially true in a fast-paced environment like AI and a good example of this is MCP. It’s beyond any doubt that MCP today is a huge trend. If there’s business value for you there then embrace the trend, build the MCP server and launch it now. And when I say “launch” I mean post it now on social. Post the announcement blog. Post it wherever your GTM and customer profile is getting their news and updates. 2 months from now is too late. Too late to the point where MCP isn’t news anymore. In fact, even now MCP isn’t the latest because Google announced their A2A - Agent to Agent framework. Entirely agnostic to MCP but now it’s the new kid on the block and you’ll be announcing your “new” MCP server when everyone else will be chatting about A2A implementations.
Launch events are going to have you chasing the trend. Stop that and ride the trend train.
Product interviews
I’m a big fan of talking to users. How else are you going to get product feedback? Sure, product metrics and analytics help but they tell you “what is happening”, not “why is it happening”.
A product metric might show you a trending down number of users for the “Implement with AI” button but it doesn’t tell you why and you can end-up drawing wrong conclusions based on that data point alone. For example, which of the following is the cause for the down trend in users: A. It takes too long for implementation code to be presented B. Implemented code is not working as expected C. Implemented code doesn’t fit the right context D. Half of the time nothing happens and get an error message
Any of these is a valid concern for the down trend but which exactly is the root cause? You need to dig deeper and ask the user.
In the old days, you’d schedule product interviews with developers in your customer-base. Good luck waiting for that to happen until your product champion is available for a chat, until they find someone on a dev team willing to talk to you, etc, etc and you just waited like 6 weeks until your first call. Cold outreach via email to invite users is also a common practice but often takes time until you get a response. Why? because the company newsletter goes out monthly, so you’re already waiting 4 weeks until your ask is out, then wait some more until someone actually follows through on it, and then even more wait time until a call is scheduled, and so on. Like I said, this doesn’t work. This is web 2.0 thinking.
What’s better?
All your old ways of product interview calls are in a “pull” mode. Flip the script. Go “push” mode and actively engage.
An incredibly good example of that are product managers from Vercel who actively post on X / Twitter and poll and ask the community to share their thoughts and ideas. They’re not waiting for you to call them. They’re actively engaging with the community and getting their feedback. This is a great way to get product feedback and it’s also a great way to build a community around your product.
