Strategy for developer outreach

I look at how to create a developer outreach strategy that is suitable for community-led projects and commercially led products, including:

• setting goals
• creating programmes
• segmentation: who are you speaking to?
• choosing the right mix of activities
• content marketing
• measurement.

You can eat and drink for free any night of the week in London. All you need are a meetup.com account and a tolerance for pizza.

In offices, co-working spaces and conference rooms across the city, groups of software developers are listening to talks, participating in workshops and hacking together. Taking time from their evenings, they’re investing in their careers, having fun and spending time with friends.

If you want to get their attention, you’ll need more than just a better set of pizza toppings.

Software developers have been sharing code, tools and ideas with each other ever since Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage gave their seminar about the Difference Engine at the University of Turin.

That sharing of ideas amongst peers is ingrained in hacker culture and it is how git, Docker, nodeJS and many other projects grew to massive adoption. Advocacy works because, usually, developers share only the tools that did a good job of solving a real world problem. In that context, traditional marketing can seem contrived and inauthentic.

The flipside, of course, is that even really great tools can go unnoticed.

In this talk, I’ll look at how to prepare for and create a developer outreach strategy that is suitable for community-led open projects or commercially led products that are aimed at developers. We’ll look at:

• setting goals
• creating programmes
• segmentation: who are you speaking to?
• choosing the right mix of activities
• content marketing
• measurement.

It sounds a bit like marketing right? Well, let’s keep this between just us, but it actually is marketing. It’s just a kind of marketing where we can choose to do the right thing.

Thank you for your consideration.