How Developers Evaluate Your Software Product
Developers don’t just adopt products—they advocate for the ones that make building effortless. If your developer journey and experience is frictionless, intuitive, and lets them dive right in, they won’t just use it—they’ll tell other developers about it.
Developers are looking at your API, SDK, platform, or tool because:
- They have the pain point your product solves and found you while searching for solutions.
- Another developer told them about your product.
It's almost always for one of these two reasons. Occasionally, developers learn about you through developer channels—where devs spend time—like conferences, events, forums, private group messages, etc. Still, it's far more likely another developer told them about you.
One could argue that some developers check out products after seeing them in the wild, like conferences, for example, but was it the booth just sitting there that created the intrigue, or was it the conversation they had at the booth with a developer? You understand my point.
Developers Just Love Building 🧱
Whether we're talking about a CTO at an enterprise company or a mid-career engineer at a scrappy startup, they think the same way. One has just shifted to leadership and orchestrates the brick building more than actually placing the bricks. They have fundamentally different requirements, but they both love building stuff.
They both want a self-serve product motion so they can evaluate your product in a single weekend coding session.
They both want to dive into a product and get a feel for it before they even consider it as an option. You're already winning if your product can do that over your competitors. Building with your product could be why a CTO gets to write some code or an engineer gets to celebrate with their team Monday morning, and that will bring them immense joy and resonate with them far more than a sales demo ever can.
Turning a Developers Love for Building Into Your Value Proposition
If you can provide developers with the journey and experience they desire when trying your product, you're far more likely to gain their acceptance and advocacy. Let's break down the journey a developer takes when considering your product.
Discovery is when a developer first stumbles upon your existence. Remember, they either found you because they were searching for you or because someone told them about you. If you're not getting new developers to your product, developers aren't talking about you, or you're not discoverable.
Research is exactly what they're doing when they land on your homepage and almost immediately head to your documentation, integrations, and pricing pages. They're quickly consuming every detail they possibly can about your product's solutions, including who and how other developers are using it.
Tessa Kriesel
Hint: They pretty much go straight to your docs.
Developers will most likely leave at this point, doing further external research, including asking about you within their trusted peer circle or channels.
Hint: Engagement and nurture opportunities are incredibly important at this point in the journey, so you can authentically remind them to come back around and evaluate your product. An invite to office hours is a great way to do this!
Evaluate takes place when the developer can sit down and try your product in their current solution or scenario. They want your product to fit into their existing workflow and stack, so SDK's and native integrations are key at this stage.
Some developers, especially in leadership, don't get the opportunity to scope out these solutions during their day-to-day. They might be evaluating your product during an evening or weekend coding session. If they find success, they'll report back to their team. If they don't, that's usually the end of that lead opportunity, and the developer moves on to another potential solution.
Your developer journey and product experience needs to meet the needs of your target developers.
Activation is when a developer has decided to utilize your solution and is building the necessary elements to "push to production." It should be simple for them to do. If this takes days or weeks, you need to address the friction in your developer journey immediately.
For example, I tried PostHog the other day. It took me a matter of minutes, and I was seeing valuable data in my dashboard. I felt like a goddess for getting it implemented so quickly, but it wasn't me at all; I only had to copy and paste one snippet of code. It was PostHog's team that made it simple to get setup.
Membership is what happens when a developer gains value from your product. They're drinking the Kool-Aid of value because you've solved their problem, and they can successfully say, "I built that," no matter how easy it was for them to solve, they're still the superhero at work. These developers become your word-of-mouth marketing.
When you provide a delightful developer experience, your developers sing your praises to other developers.
Developer Self-Serve Readiness is the Key to Developer Success
If you understand your target audience deeply and the experience they desire because you know their current stack and workflow, you can craft a developer journey that converts your leads into advocates, sometimes overnight [if you're that good].
PostHog and I have only been besties for a couple weeks, but it happened "overnight," and they've already been included in two of my recent blog posts and mentioned in a live stream. This is what developers do. When we find products we love, we talk about them.
We didn't work with PostHog; we are just admirers, but we can help you also provide a delightful experience for your developers. Book a call.