Developer Marketing, Funnels & the STaRS Framework

My name is Indy. I'm really thrilled to be here today to talk to you and kick us off around this awesome topic, which is product marketing. Just to ground us, I figured I'd start by giving a brief definition of what I, as a product marketer, consider product marketing and what I've also seen across the board — help you think about product marketing as a mindset to begin with, help you define what metrics should look like, how to set goals for yourself, and how to get the most out of product marketing. That sound good? OK, let's get started.

Please raise your hand if you either have heard the statement or agree with the statement. OK. I've heard it a bunch in my career so far as a product marketer. I've worked a lot with developer tools — both at Salesforce, at Box, MuleSoft, at Google Cloud as well. I've always heard this in conversation, especially with product leaders or from developers themselves — a lot of times they tell you that too. Is it really true? Do developers hate marketing? I'm not quite sure.

If you think about the number of developers you see on the street, almost invariably they're wearing either some type of swag for a product they use. It could be a fashion brand, but most times it's something from a developer tools company. Sure, those T-shirts are free, they're soft, they feel good — it's always nice to have something like that and people respond to it. But I think it takes a special relationship with a company and a brand for you to wear it on your chest or slap a sticker on your laptop. I don't think there's any higher endorsement. This is something that Nike would pay for. Clorox even — if you put a Clorox sticker on your laptop, they'd be pretty happy.

I think that begets a certain truth which is that developers don't hate marketing — they hate bad marketing. Who doesn't hate bad marketing? Robocalls, are you kidding me? Head On, apply to forehead. Really annoying. I think developers respond really poorly to bad marketing. Where marketing doesn't hit the mark with this audience is if you're inauthentic or basically just phoning it in.

I've been at companies where we had an enterprise product catered to IT decision makers and then someone would say: "Just maybe move this word around and it'll work — the strategy will work everywhere, no matter what the audience." That doesn't work with developers. They will light you up if they get a sense of any degree of inauthenticity in your marketing or any fakeness. It's not a good look, trust me.

That's why marketing matters. Because on the other hand, if you do get them in your camp, if you get them to wear your shirt, if you do get them to put your sticker on their laptop, there's no higher brand of endorsement. Even if you're in a business where you are marketing to IT decision makers — invariably those executives will always say "What should we use for this tool? What should we use for our infrastructure?" and they will go to that developer. If that developer says "I heard about the company and they're a rock" — that's the feedback loop you want. That's why developer marketing matters, and that's why product marketing, done right, really works.

Product marketing — what is it? The way I think about it, product marketing sits at the intersection of three functions: product, sales, and marketing.

Let's start with product. The relationship you want to foster is one where you are the trusted advisor as a marketer to the product organization. If engineering and product build the plot of what you're building, marketing is going to deliver the narrative — just like in the movies, one doesn't work without the other. That's why it's really important to foster a two-way conversation between product and marketing.

Sales — this is definitely more true on the enterprise side — is the front line to what you're doing as a developer tool and a company. You want to equip them with materials that are authentic, that can really convey the value proposition of your product and how it helps a developer be better at their job. Product marketing is sales' best friend.

Then finally, marketing. You may be a company where you don't even have one marketer. Product marketing will probably spend more time with either product and sales than with marketing. Communication is of the essence. In my roles as a product marketer, whether at a small company or a big one, I was essentially the router for information. I'd sit in product sprints, figure out what we were building, and immediately communicate the value proposition and pass it on to folks across channels — brand, web, and whatnot. No matter your size, product marketing is the channel and the router of information.

Put together, it's a really valuable discipline and even a mindset. Even if you don't have all these functions fully baked, just having the mindset of a product marketer is really valuable. It's the closest thing to being a general manager for some of these areas. Not only are you thinking about "What are you building? How are you going to sell it?" but also "How are you going to tell the story and why?" These are all areas you need to think about whether you are a marketer, you want to hire a marketer, or you're a founder.

Let's talk about how to frame success. In my career I've seen product marketing used in many different ways. Invariably, no matter the situation, there were always three things that helped me do my job and lead my team: funnels, STaRS, and metrics.

Funnels. The standard sales funnel — top is awareness and interest, middle is consideration and preference and getting people to try your product, bottom is when you make the sale. Developer marketing and the product marketing funnel for developers is not that much different. But the one nuance is that for a developer audience, you're not necessarily trying to convert them — they're not always the decision maker or the buyer. They will, however, be the user and the adopter. So the developer funnel ends not at a sale but at adoption and advocacy. That's the bottom of the funnel you're driving toward.

What's great about a funnel is that you can dose it by intent. If you have an awareness problem, start with top-level funnel activities. If you have issues around getting conversions and getting people to do "Hello, World" moments with your product, focus on the middle of the funnel.

Let me illustrate that with what we did at Box. I was at Box for about three years. Both Jeremy and I were working on the platform team at Box. Our biggest issue with developers was that they thought we were Dropbox. When you have a name that's very similar and you do almost the same thing, it's pretty tricky. Developers knew that Dropbox had a huge sway with consumers and a lot of eyeballs. But with enterprise developers, we were able to convert them and hone in on this value proposition — help them get into enterprise accounts, because we had the right platform, the right APIs, and the right approach to making something truly enterprise-grade.

I'd like to tell you that we had this all baked out, that Jeremy and I presented this funnel strategy to our VPs from day one. I would love to tell you that — but the truth is we stumbled on it. We tried a lot of things. Early on, working with leadership who didn't really know what they wanted, our CEO Aaron Levie said: "We want 10,000 developers." We didn't know why or when, but that's what he wanted. We had to stumble on how to get there. It was more like random acts of marketing at first.

At the end of the day it came together pretty well and the results spoke for themselves. Within two years we spun up our own developer conference that was just as big as our customer conference. We also did some cool things — we took a bunch of our integration partners and put them on the 101. To the point where their investors would call them like: "I just saw your logo on the 101, what's up with that?"

We ended up finding a real intent and a sweet spot, which was: we were the enterprise startup that helped other enterprise startups. I'd like to tell you again that we knew that was our intent from the start — but that was not the case. What I'm here to tell you is: think about your intent before you engage in marketing activities, because that will really help you move the needle and get to where you want to be fast.

That's where STaRS comes in. More specifically: STaRS. This is a framework I came across reading a business book — like any business book, you can sum it up in one slide. It's a book called The First 90 Days. Mandatory reading in business school. The idea is that any job you're in, it pays off to take stock of what situation you're in. Are you in a startup situation? Are you in a mode where you need to grow, turn things around, or realign? All these are different situations that you can prescribe specific tactics against.

Let me illustrate that with what we did at MuleSoft. When I joined MuleSoft, they had made their name on open source and had a huge, popular product in that world. They made a pivot to enterprise, and as a result they neglected their developer base. That's where my team came in. Our mission was to turn things around — a classic turnaround scenario.

What we tried to do was take a holistic view of everything: marketing programs, content, and even product onboarding. We said: where do we need to grease the skids? Some of those were marketing activities — redoing the website, redoing the documentation. Some were more around product onboarding, with marketing helping steer that. Remember what I said about being a GM? Having that holistic view. This project was one that our team led precisely because we had that 360 view. By using tools like WalkMe to help with product onboarding, we were able to increase product engagement by about 54% — getting people to "Hello, World" moments. Then by revamping our documentation and the website, we were also able to drive meaningful engagement and traffic.

It does pay off to think about metrics beforehand — but only after you've designed your objectives. If you think about the funnel and your goals, the intent you're trying to hit, the metrics will yield themselves automatically. If you have an awareness problem, you obviously want to get to website visits, trials, sign-ups. If you're trying to get consideration, you want to goose up daily actives, monthly actives, and Hello World completions.

What's great about this system is that it tells you not only the "why," but also the "what" and the "how" when you go to market. Whether you have a product marketer or not, I think it's good business to think about things in a way that's holistic — that way you know what you want to get out of marketing.

When we were able to bring this framework to bear, I was sitting across our founder and our technical officers and they were all saying: "This makes sense — now let's look at how things performed." We were able to move the needle across website traffic, forum growth, and a bunch of other areas by activating different channels with clear intent behind each one.

There are also soft metrics. An illustration: at our user conference, we used our relationship with engineering and product to come up with really cool activations. We were able to shift perception with analysts — Ray Wong, a top analyst at Constellation Research and very influential in this space, totally geeked out on what we did with IoT and integrations, which was MuleSoft's calling card. Don't think only about hard metrics like website visits — things that can sometimes be goosed artificially. You want to leave a lasting impression with the folks you're trying to reach. That's what gets them to put your sticker on their laptop. That's what gets them to wear your shirt.

Putting it together: get into the product marketing mindset. But before you do that, think about what really matters. Think about how you want to structure things. Think about why you're doing what you're doing, why you're going to prioritize one project over another, and how you're going to measure success. If you do that, you are really poised to succeed. You can negotiate success as a founder, or your marketer can negotiate success with you.

To conclude: there is no better time to do this. If you think about where the future is going, developer tools are the building blocks. Most of the building blocks will be digital, and these are all things that you're working on. There's no better time to be in this space. Thank you.