🚀 Liran Tal

~ 9 min read

DevRel Failures? Maybe Your Marketing and Product Strategies Are Outdated

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You're probably facing some DevRel failures or marketing failures. Maybe your product and marketing strategies are actually outdated and causing customer churn, and overall frustration?

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Developer Relations (DevRel) is often in the intersection of marketing, product and engineering. Undoubtedly, DevRel has been facing a turmoil of changes, layoffs and strategic shifts within startup and companies but maybe it is your product and marketing strategies that are actually outdated and causing customer churn, and overall frustration?

The following are some of my impressions and thoughts from working with founders, devtool companies and startups in the technology space around AI, software engineering, and application security domain.

The old days

In the “old days”, which in this fast-pacing environment of technology startups is basically 4 years ago, we used to follow very concrete playbooks for everything across DevRel, Marketing and Product.

Some examples of these playbooks include:

  • Scheduled launch events for product announcements
  • The product team filters and caters through a customer-base to hunt for leads for user interviews
  • Throwing marketing money at a non-viable product doesn’t work and doesn’t scale
  • Product managers are stuck in slides, planning and roadmaps instead of direct user engagement and showcasing

1. Product launch event? sigh you’re already too late

If you’re scheduling launch events for 2 months from now or longer, I’m sorry to tell you but that boat has sailed.

Why are you holding back on your ability to innovate and execute at a fast pace?

You’ve built something out? a prototype, an early access version, a closed beta? It’s ready to launch. Spread the news. Put it on social, get an announcement article published on the blog. Don’t keep this waiting on the launch pad for 2 months.

This is especially true in a fast-paced environment like AI and a good example of this is MCP. It’s beyond any doubt that MCP today is a huge trend. If there’s business value for you there then embrace the trend, build the MCP server and launch it now. And when I say “launch” I mean post it now on social. Post the announcement blog. Post it wherever your GTM and customer profile is getting their news and updates. 2 months from now is too late. Too late to the point where MCP isn’t news anymore. In fact, even now MCP isn’t the latest because Google announced their A2A - Agent to Agent framework. Entirely agnostic to MCP but now it’s the new kid on the block and you’ll be announcing your “new” MCP server when everyone else will be chatting about A2A implementations.

Launch events are going to have you chasing the trend. Stop that and ride the trend train.

How to Launch?

Focused, frequent, and fast-paced launches (FFF).

  • Focused: your launch should be focused on a single feature or storyline. Don’t try cramming a whole backlog pile of epics or cross-platform story. Leave those for bigger events and announcements. That feature is experimental? under a feature flag? that’s fine, launch it, grab feedback, iterate on it.
  • Frequent: don’t think of launches as a bi-annual event or something that needs the stars aligned to happen. You’ll miss opportunities and you’ll miss the momentum. Launches should be happening as-fast as you are providing values to your users. If you don’t feel you have enough value to launch, it should be a signal of whether you are actually providing value to your users.
  • Fast-paced: don’t hold off, don’t wait for some adjacent event to happen. You have something you can demo? Launch it now. Grab attention over mindshare and marketshare (thank you Manoj for coining those!). Being quick at it also narrows the window of opportunity for competitors to catch up with you, but more so, forces you to avoid an over-engineered launch theater and instead focus on actual GTM launch tactics that provide the highest ROI.

Examples of this are deep AI companies who continuously launch and innovate:

  1. Anthropic’s X account is enough to follow to see all the innovation they are pushing: https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1925633118104416587
  2. Eleven Labs is another great example: https://x.com/elevenlabsio/status/1934624075067928578

Another example reference to call out is product managers evangelizing the product as part of the launch (and I expand more on this later). Following is Cat from Anthropic AI working on Claude Code:

2. User interviews

I’m a big fan of talking to users. How else are you going to get product feedback? Sure, product metrics and analytics help but they tell you “what is happening”, not “why is it happening”.

A product metric might show you a trending down number of users for the “Implement with AI” button but it doesn’t tell you why and you can end-up drawing wrong conclusions based on that data point alone. For example, which of the following is the cause for the down trend in users:

  • A. It takes too long for implementation code to be presented
  • B. Implemented code is not working as expected
  • C. Implemented code doesn’t fit the right context
  • D. Half of the time nothing happens and get an error message

Any of these is a valid concern for the down trend but which exactly is the root cause? You need to dig deeper and ask the user.

In the old days, you’d schedule user interviews with developers in your customer-base. Good luck waiting for that to happen until your product champion is available for a chat, until they find someone on a dev team willing to talk to you, etc, etc and you just waited like 6 weeks until your first call. Cold outreach via email to invite users is also a common practice but often takes time until you get a response. Why? because the company newsletter goes out monthly, so you’re already waiting 4 weeks until your ask is out, then wait some more until someone actually follows through on it, and then even more wait time until a call is scheduled, and so on. Like I said, this doesn’t work. This is web 2.0 thinking.

How to do user interviews?

What’s a better way to approach user interviews? All your old ways of product interview calls are in a “pull” mode. Flip the script. Go “push” mode and actively engage.

An incredibly good example of that are product managers from Vercel who actively post on X / Twitter and poll and ask the community to share their thoughts and ideas. They’re not waiting for you to call them. They’re actively engaging with the community and getting their feedback. This is a great way to get product feedback and it’s also a great way to build a community around your product.

Example reference 1:

Example reference 2:

3. Marketing can’t fix product

No amount of DevRel (or developer marketing, if you will) will solve a broken product or one that isn’t providing value to your users.

Lee Rob from Vercel said “Marketing can’t fix a broken product” and he’s absolutely right. Specifically for developer relations activities, a genuine and authentic relationship with the developer community is grounded in providing a product value. Broken product in any shape or form, such as poor user experience, poor developer experience, or just a total lack of value that developers can extract from using the product, will simply create frustration and a disconnect between the product and the developer community (or the developer relations team).

How to fix product marketing?

Listen to your users. Ask them. What are they trying to solve? what is the primary pain point and how is the product solving that?

Don’t gaslite developers. Assume critical thinking and don’t just dismiss user frustration with “it’s in our backlog” or “we are zoned in on enterprise users and this isn’t a problem for them”, otherwise don’t be surprised that you’ve lost the trust and brand loyalty of your developer community.

Example reference 1, Isidor Nikolic from Microsoft’s VS Code team, replying to users:

4. Product managers fail to engage with users

Product work is a lot, often surrounded by meetings, planning, slides, cross-functional team roadmap and data analysis. None of that is inherently bad or wrong but if product managers does not actively, frequently and consistently engage with users, they will lose touch with reality of which your users are facing.

Are your product managers stuck in a bubble? the worst is a product manager building into an echo chamber of their own ideas and assumptions, late to the game to realize the product is already a year too late into the market and current workflows.

How to fix product engagement?

Forget scheduled meeting with customers. Forget the design team doing user interviews. Forget watching website recorded visual interactions. All of them are valid but not as impactful as direct engagement with users.

Go to where your users are. Ready to take it up a notch? become the product ambassador and influencer.

In the case of developers, this is mostly X (Twitter), relevant Reddit subs, Discord and slack spaces. Better yet if you can also show up in person at meetups, user groups and conferences to an extent.

Example reference 1, Dina Kozlov from Cloudflare’s developer platform team:

Example reference 2, Lee Rob from Vercel:

Example reference 3, Pierce Boggan from Microsoft’s VS Code team:

Liran Tal is the author of the book Node.js Secure Coding: Defending Against Command Injection Vulnerabilities

The book: Node.js Secure Coding: Defending Against Command Injection Vulnerabilities