What makes a developer program successful?
This is the question we asked in the Developer Program Leaders survey, and developer programs strategists responded.
The survey ran for 8 weeks (February 2020 – April 2020) and 96 developer program practitioners responded.
Usually, presenting the results is part of our Future Developer Summit offering. However, given the current state of world affairs, we offer this presentation as part of an on-demand webinar, so everyone can benefit from it.
The results show the main focus and strategy surrounding the leading developer programs and how their teams make decisions and set their strategies.
One key insight:
Developer marketing KPIs and DevRel KPIs are different
Top-5 DevRel KPIs
Registered developers, accounts - 48%
Developer satisfaction score - 48%
Product usage (e.g. amount of cloud resources) - 40%
Monthly active users (Telemetry or API analytics) - 40%
Net Promoter Score - 38%
Top-5 Developer Marketing KPIs
Page or video views - 55%
Unique visitors or IP addresses - 54%
Number of sponsored events/attendance - 52%
Social Media followers / YouTube subscribers - 52%
Monthly active users (Telemetry or API analytics) - 43%
You can access the webinar and all insights, for free, here:
At the same time, the past 2 months have been a huge challenge for companies who are asked to pivot their strategies, mid-Q1. Pivoting is by no means easy. You need data to help drive the decision and invest your energy into the things that matter the most to developers.
The Developer Programs Benchmarking is just in (and just in time).
Why is that important?
It benchmarks developer programs and showcases the leaders by pointing out which strengths stand out against weaknesses. It addresses questions like:
How do your budgets, KPIs, developer segments, and regional strategies compare to your peer programs?
How do your marketing dollars realise the maximum value?
How can you improve the ranking of your program across the features developers find most important?
Here are some highlights on how the DPB can help everyone build the best pivot strategy, based on data:
What developers value most are documentation and sample code, development tools, tutorials and answers in public forums. These are resources and activities that are directly relevant to their day-to-day productivity, that help them improve their skills, and that help them solve problems they face
Conferences and trade shows are clearly considered a core activity by developer program leaders. Unfortunately, it appears very low on the wish-list of developers.
European developers are generally much less engaged with developer programs than their counterparts in other regions.
Google, Mozilla and Microsoft lead the way. Download the free graph and see where everyone else stands.