The most important skill in developer marketing
A primer on customer empathy and how to master it
“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”.