“Write code - Talk to users.”

That’s one of Y Combinator's essential pieces of startup advice. But I also think it’s a great mantra for developer marketers. 

By writing code and talking to users, it will help you hone the most important skill in developer marketing: Customer Empathy. 

What is customer empathy?

Customer empathy is the ability to understand the motives, pain and context of the developer you seek to serve. It’s about deeply understanding the individual developer and the broader organization in which they operate. 

Let’s break that definition down:

• Motives: Who are they? What are they trying to accomplish and why? What matters to them and why? What are the broader goals for themselves, their team, and their company?

• Pain: Why isn’t the status quo working for them? What’s their pain point? What would solving that pain enable them to achieve?

• Context: What does their status quo look like? What tools do they use to do their job? What does their workflow look like? What kind of company and team do they work in?

Why does customer empathy matter?

Customer empathy is the only skill that matters. 

If you have low empathy for your customer, you’re fighting an uphill battle. You can have a team of product marketers, developer advocates and growth marketers with the execution ability of Seal Team 6, but without sufficient customer empathy your plans will fall flat. Lack of customer empathy is what results in bad marketing and developers feeling like they’re being shouted at.

If you have high customer empathy, everything becomes easier. Even a mediocre team armed with high empathy for their customers can stumble their way to success. Having high customer empathy helps you to build an intuition around who you seek to serve and what they value. It’s the skill that unlocks all other skills.

You or your teammates are probably asking questions like:

• How can we reach more developers?

• How can we write more compelling messaging?

• How can we create more useful sample apps?

• How can we make more effective sales collateral?

• How can we position your product as a no-brainer?

The answer to those questions will not be found in the mechanics of distribution, copywriting or positioning, but in improving your customer empathy so that you can better see the world through the eyes of the developers you seek to serve.

How to improve your customer empathy?

This is where “Write code. Talk to users” comes in.

Write code: Get your hands dirty! Do the things that your target developers are trying to do themselves. Use the products they currently use. Try the alternatives to your product. Even mini-versions and POCs can give you a lot of intuition for broader and longer term pain points.

Talk to users: There’s a reason you have two ears and one mouth – listen! Do user interviews. Read posts in your forum and slack community. Follow users on Twitter and LinkedIn. Study support tickets. Watch call recordings and read interview transcripts. Talk to engineers in your own company about their experiences.

➡️ Write code. Talk to users. Rinse and repeat.

What methods have you found most effective to build more customer empathy? Let me know in the comments! 👇

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Image generated by Midjourney with prompt: “Intuition”.

Image generated by AI Midjourney. Prompt: Female software developer hate marketing octane render.

“Developers hate being marketed to.”

I think that’s a myth.

Developers love being marketed to. They don’t like bad marketing, just like every other human. And most technical product companies do a bad job of marketing to developers.

They talk “at” developers. They start with their product, rather than with the problem. They talk about their features, rather than why they matter.  

They shout, “Look at us. Look at what we built. It’s the best thing ever! Use it! Pay for it!”

The reason why many DevRel practitioners believe that developers hate marketing is because their concept of “marketing” is incomplete. They have an inside-out perspective of marketing – where marketing is rooted in aggressive self-promotion, self-serving content, and relentless sales pitches with questionable credibility.

I’ve been fortunate to serve countless developers and work alongside amazing developer marketing leaders during my 4+ years at database startup Timescale. Those experiences taught me a new perspective on developer marketing, one that debunked the traditional wisdom that “developers hate being marketed to”, and showed me how to do marketing that developers love.

Good developer marketing is outside-in. It starts with the developer –  their world, their goals, their problems –  and works backwards. Good developer marketing is a practice rooted in empathy, authenticity and a genuine desire to help the developers you seek to serve. It’s not about trying to increase your top of funnel, get signups, or increase usage of the product. Those are happy by-products.

Good developer marketing makes the developer the hero of the journey. Your product is just the sword that helps them slay the dragon. Good developer marketing earns trust by being technically credible, acknowledging trade-offs, and scenarios where your product might not be the best option. It’s showing that change is possible and how your product offers a better way. 

If you put in the work to understand your developer audience, meet them where they are, and earn their attention and trust by being helpful, then developers will love being marketed to by you.

Now you know that it’s possible for developers to love your marketing, not simply bear it.

How will you rise to the challenge?

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SCENE A 🤦

Customer: Do you support feature X? We can’t move forward unless you have it.

Teammate A: Umm, no. Our product doesn’t have feature X. Sorry.

Customer: That’s too bad. X is a requirement. We’re going to look for alternatives.

SCENE B 🤩

Customer: Do you support feature X?  We can’t move forward unless you have it.

Teammate B: Before I answer, can you tell me more about the need for feature X? How and why do you use it?

Customer: We need it for {customer explains their use case and what X enables}

Teammate B: That makes sense. While we don’t support feature X, we have feature Y that would fulfill most of your requirements. Here’s some info about it…

Customer: Great, we’ll take a look at Y and move forward.

What’s the difference between the scene where a customer continues to try your product and the one where they abandon and look for alternatives? 

The answer: meta questions.

Midjourney prompt: Crystal clear compelling communication modern art

🤔What are meta questions?

Meta questions help you understand the hidden motives behind questions others ask. You can think of meta questions as “the question behind the question”. Meta questions help you identify the most important thing for the person you’re communicating with. This helps you give them more useful answers that actually meet their needs.

Mastering meta questions will make you a prompt engineer, but for human intelligence instead of AI. Asking meta questions will make you a more effective communicator, whether you’re talking with external stakeholders like prospects or customers, or internal stakeholders like your sales, product or engineering teammates.

Meta questions reduce confusion. If there’s one thing remote work has taught us, it’s that communicating effectively async over Slack/Teams/email is hard! Meta questions help keep conversations focused bringing to light previously hidden or obscure motives, making it easier to arrive at decisions. Asking meta questions also helps unearth assumptions and easy to forget details, reducing the surface area for confusion when communicating remotely. 

Meta questions reveal context. They provide the right prompts for the other person to give you the bigger picture, with more details about why, who, what, where and when, which in turn help you provide more relevant answers to their questions.

Meta questions clarify purpose. Asking meta questions gives others the opportunity to explain their priorities and clarify why something is important to them. They help you better understand the hidden purpose behind their question, and their goals in general, enabling you to communicate with them in such a way that better fulfills their needs.

So ask meta questions. And communicate such that others don’t have to ask them to you.

So this week at work, before you give a yes/no answer to someone’s question, take a moment to step back and ask a meta question to help you understand more.

But if you really want to level up your communication, structure your communication such that others don’t have to ask you meta questions. Answer the meta questions beforehand! Give others relevant context, motivations and details such that it’s easy for them to give you the answers you need.

How do you ask good meta questions? By asking yourself “What am I really trying to do?”. WAYRTTD or What Are You Really Trying To Do is a useful tool for clearer thinking I learned from Shreyas Doshi, Product Manager extraordinaire. Asking yourself what you’re really trying to do helps put into words your purpose for communicating, and helps you identify implicit assumptions to make explicit.

I started asking WAYRTTD before sending out Slack messages to folks on my technical product marketing team.

Instead of asking for deliverables with messages like:

❌ Can you send me document X?

I put in an extra 2 minutes and started asking questions like this:

✅ Can you send me document X in the next hour? It’s okay if it’s not complete. I want to get a sense of where we are before my meeting with stakeholder X tomorrow morning.

This made communication with my team a lot more effective. Folks would often fulfill my request faster (no need to panic about the doc being unfinished and why I needed document X). But they would also often go above and beyond the ask by giving me additional context not contained in the requested doc that would help me with my meeting.

Happy meta questioning!

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The question I get most often after introducing my occupation is “What is a Product Marketing Manager?” and “What do you actually do?”

In this article, I’ll be answering those questions for you.

I’ll also cover the 5 Pillars of Technical Product Marketing (PMM) and why the continued rise of products that help software developers makes Technical PMM more important than ever.

Who is this article for?

• Mid-career B2B or B2C product marketers considering switching to developer products.

• Early career PMMs who want to explore future career paths.

• Folks working at developer product companies who want to understand the role of Technical PMM and better work with them.

• Computer Science majors interested in tech but who don’t want to be software engineers – technical product marketing could be a great fit for you!

• My friends and family who ask me questions about my job (Hi mum!).

Let’s dive in!

🧠What is a Technical Product Marketing Manager?

Technical PMM in one sentence

A technical product marketing manager is the person who can answer the question: “How does our product help customer X with problem Y better than alternatives Z?”.

Technical PMM in one paragraph

A Technical PMM builds expert knowledge about the market, product and the customer. Early career Technical PMMs are responsible for a single feature, problem and customer segment. As they grow in seniority, Technical PMMs are responsible for multiple markets, entire product lines and customer segments with distinct needs. Technical PMMs use their knowledge of the product-market-customer trifecta to write the proverbial script from which all other teams read. They equip others in the company with insights, messaging and collateral to attract and win customers. Technical PMMs help inform Product and Engineering about market requirements. And they help Marketing and Sales speak the customer’s language in order to show how the product can solve your ideal customer’s problems better than alternatives.

What kind of companies do Technical PMMs work at?

Technical Product Marketing Managers are needed at companies with products built to serve a highly technical audience.

You’ll need technical PMMs to help software developers choose the right:

• database for their application

• API to use in their login or authentication feature 

• tool for their workflow

Technical audience is a broad term, but often includes roles like software developers, software engineers, data engineers, data scientists, DevOps engineers, data analysts and machine learning engineers, and researchers. 

While Product Marketing Managers are generally found at almost every company, whether consumer or B2B, Technical PMMs thrive at B2B companies building technical products.

Who does a Technical PMM work with?

Being a Technical Product Marketer is a highly cross-functional role, collaborating with many different teams and in startups often working with the entire company.

Most commonly, Technical PMMs work closely with product managers in the Product org, growth marketers, content writers, developer advocates and others in the Marketing org, and sales reps, account executives and customer success managers in the Sales org.

🐸Why is Technical Product Marketing Important?

Why are Technical PMMs important to developer focused companies?

Technical Product Marketing is a highly strategic and leveraged role. The decisions and activities conducted by Technical PMMs have downstream impact on the entire Go-To-Market process. When done right, Technical Product Marketing equips the rest of the company with the foundation to run full speed at their goals. When done wrong, even the world class growth marketers and salespeople will struggle to win, because they’re hindered by lack of knowledge about the customer, market and product.

Put another way, Technical PMMs are…

• The conductor of the orchestra, harmonizing various musical instruments and sections to create a beautiful symphony.

• The quarterback in American football, leading and calling plays on the field, driving the team towards a touchdown and ultimately victory.

• The midfielders in a soccer match, controlling the tempo of the game and creating chances for their teammates to score goals and secure a win.

• The ringleader of the circus, orchestrating a dazzling spectacle by coordinating acrobats, jugglers, and performers to entertain and amaze the audience.

• The master chess player, anticipating opponents' moves and strategically positioning pieces to ensure victory.

• The director of a movie, orchestrating actors, set designs, and cinematography to create a unified and impactful story.

In all of these analogies, the Technical PMM plays a similar strategic and pivotal role, ensuring that different teams, processes, and elements of a go-to-market motion come together effectively to achieve the company’s goals.

Why is Technical Product Marketing important as a profession?

Software has eaten the world. And with every company becoming a software company, developers and other technical builders are the new driving forces for a company’s success. As a result, there’s an explosion of technical products which all compete to see who can best help folks like developers, engineers, and data scientists.

The role of Technical Product Marketing is more important than ever. Developers need to be able to answer “Is this product for me?” amidst the sea of tools, new and old. And developer-focused companies need amphibians who are comfortable in both technical complexity and business strategy to help their products delight customers and their companies dominate markets. 

🏛️What does a Technical Product Marketing Manager do?

Let’s deep dive into how Technical PMMs conduct the orchestra, and turn ambiguity into GTM symphonies by examining the 5 Pillars of Technical Product Marketing:

1. Customer Empathy

2. Market Insight

3. Positioning and Messaging

4. Launches

5. Sales Enablement and Collateral

Unlike the conjoined triangles of success, you won’t find this framework in an MBA textbook. I created the 5 Pillars of Technical PMM from my experience working as an IC and leading a Technical Product Marketing organization. In my pursuit to become a world-class Technical PMM and help others on my team to the same, the 5 Pillars framework helped me encapsulate the most important skills of Technical PMMs in order to diagnose areas of strength and weakness, and help us move toward mastery in the discipline. The 5 Pillars framework also helped me categorize and prioritize the myriad projects PMMs could work on at any moment, so that I could ensure we worked on areas with the highest leverage and impact, both individually and as a team.

Let’s explore each pillar and look at example activities that fall under it.

👂Pillar 1: Customer Empathy

PMMs strive to understand customers’ problems. They develop high-definition  pictures of who customers are, their workflows, the jobs-to-be-done and the tools they use to do them, and goals for themselves, their team, and their company. Technical PMMs identify and empathize with a customer’s pain and pinpoint why the status quo isn’t working for them.

Customer Empathy is the most important pillar in Technical Product Marketing, as all the impact Technical PMMs drive in a company comes from being able to see the world through the eyes of their target customers. 

This is also what distinguishes the skills of Technical PMM’s from “regular” PMMs. Technical PMMs need to be familiar with the vernacular of folks like software developers and data scientists. They also need to have a base level of technical skills to be able to use the product just like a customer – whether it’s writing Python programs, SQL queries or building a dashboard with a database and visualization tool. Developing technical skills and familiarity with the surrounding context of your customer’s problem helps Technical PMMs build an independent intuition about problems and solutions, enabling them to add value to the product and engineering teams (e.g by informing the product roadmap) rather than only adding value to marketing and sales.

Example Technical PMM activities for Customer Empathy:

• Customer research via interviews and surveys.

• Attending events and talking to prospective customers.

• Building Customer Journey Maps (CJMs).

• Building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – a high definition picture of who your ideal customer is and how your product suits them.

• Win/loss analysis – why are customers choosing to use or not use your product?

• Segmentation – how can we group customers depending on their needs and characteristics to better find and win them?

• Securing customer evidence from Sales/ Customer Success –  this includes getting quotes, case studies, and other references.

🔮Pillar 2: Market Insights

Technical PMMs build a 10,000 foot view of the markets in which a product operates and how their product can win in those markets. They research market trends, analyze competitors’ strategy, products and customers, and recommend new markets for the company to enter and products and features for the company to build.

Example Technical PMM activities for Market Insight:

• Competitive Analysis Artifacts – Benchmarks, competitive battlecards, competitor product analysis.

• Building Market Requirements Documents (MRD) – a deep dive into a market and why/ how the company should enter it.

• Competitor landscape artifacts – by segment or business need, which products does your company compete with?

• Market research – market segmentation, sizing, TAM.

• Non-customer research – talking to potential and non-users of your product to gain insight into their goals, problems and current tools they use.

🏆Pillar 3: Positioning and Messaging

Technical PMMs take their understanding of customer and market and translate that into strategic positioning against competitive alternatives for a customer’s problems. They translate that position into crisp messaging for specific audience segments (e.g by horizontal, vertical or demography) to help them see your products as the best solution for their problems.

Example Technical PMM activities for Positioning and Messaging:

• Develop and tell the story of the product: What is it? Why does it exist? Who is it for?

• Positioning frameworks (vs different competitors, for different use cases etc).

• Messaging frameworks by customer profile and persona – standardize product and feature descriptions, top use cases, jobs to be done and hero features.

• Value and benefit-focused messaging frameworks – these are used to support content, webpages and interactive tools around key value propositions.

• Perform tests of positioning and messaging to gauge user resonance.

🚀Pillar 4: Launches

Technical PMMs infuse customer empathy and market knowledge into the product, marketing and sales strategy along each touch point of the customer’s journey – from finding the product, to running in production, and using new features as a happy customer. Technical PMMs drive the launch and promotion of new products and features, and lead the creation of artifacts like blog posts, and own properties like the company website.

Example Technical PMM activities for Launches:

• Help the Product team drive releases of new products and features.

• Captain launches by creating and executing launch plans with stakeholders.

• Messaging and customer insight artifacts for campaigns, product and feature launches.

• Messaging frameworks for web pages and landing pages.

• Content and artifacts for each stage of the customer journey.

🤝Pillar 5: Enablement and Collateral

Technical PMMs package their understanding of customer problems into artifacts of all kinds that enable folks to better do their jobs in the sales and marketing process to better do their jobs. Most commonly, Technical PMMs own Sales Enablement– they equip salespeople with slide decks, competitive intelligence, playbooks, demos and training to win deals and retain customers. They also create collateral for marketing teams to find and convert new leads, such as audience briefs for events, messaging frameworks for campaigns, and pain point deep dives to inform content strategy.

Example Technical PMM activities for Enablement and Collateral:

• Building and running sales training sessions about the product, market and customer. 

• Creating sales collateral – sales decks, segment playbooks, datasheets, 1 pagers and more!

• Crafting messaging for sales reps to test via cold outreach.

• Messaging frameworks that outline persona-message-CTA recommendations. 

• Feature demos 

• Building customer evidence repositories

Conclusion

That’s it for today’s deep dive on the role of the Technical Product Marketing Manager and why it’s important, both within developer-focused companies and in the tech industry at large.

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