The engaged developer funnel  ## Metadata - Author: [[Dev Rel]] - Full Title: The engaged developer funnel - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [Developer-Relations, DevRel, Marketing, Metrics, Funnel] author: [MISSING] source: YouTube reference: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4] date created: {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}} {{time:HH:mm}} --- # 🏷️ Title: The engaged developer funnel ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - DevRelCon conference series: https://www.devrelcon.dev/ - Neo4j GraphAcademy: https://graphacademy.neo4j.com/ - Developer education research, “Developers prefer self-serve”: https://segment.com/academy/collecting-data/developer-experience/ - Product-led growth primer: https://www.productled.org/blog/what-is-product-led-growth - YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4 ## 📝 Summary - **What happened.** A DevRel leader proposes an engaged developer funnel over classic marketing funnels. He explains measurement and executive alignment using owned signals. ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4)) - **Why it matters.** Classic funnels misread developer learning and behavior. Hands-on education and communities drive durable adoption. ([PLG primer](https://www.productled.org/blog/what-is-product-led-growth)) - **Key stakeholders.** DevRel teams, executives, boards, investors, product, education, and community managers. - **Risks and tradeoffs.** Overfitting metrics to owned platforms can bias results. Cross-org attribution remains hard. ([Segment DX](https://segment.com/academy/collecting-data/developer-experience/)) - **Bottom line.** Measure engaged developers across three pillars: basics, appropriate use, and top-of-mind re-engagement. Tie work to revenue motions through champions. ## 📖 Main Content - **Problem.** Traditional funnels optimize lead volume, not developer learning. This sets DevRel up to miss executive expectations. ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4)) - **Core proposal.** Track an engaged developer state. Require three signals: knows basics, knows when to use, stays top-of-mind. Map programs to acquisition, progression, re-engagement, and education. - **How developers learn.** They learn by doing, workshops, peers, and hackathons. Cold outreach underperforms. Evidence supports self-serve, PLG tactics. ([Segment DX](https://segment.com/academy/collecting-data/developer-experience/), [PLG](https://www.productled.org/blog/what-is-product-led-growth)) - **Executive alignment.** CEOs and boards care about champions behind deals. Report engaged counts and growth from owned education and cloud telemetry. ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4)) - **Data design.** Normalize platform metrics into a warehouse. Favor high-intent actions over vanity metrics for reliability. ### 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4&t=14) Context and audience framing - The talk targets DevRel leaders and executives. - Goal: explain DevRel value to CEO and board. ### [H1] Traditional funnel metrics fail DevRel goals > “When your metrics… are tied to this funnel, you are doomed to failure.” - Rationale: funnels reward volume, not learning. This misses developer reality. #### ⏱️ [06:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4&t=399) How developers actually learn - Doing, classes, peers, and hackathons lead learning. - Outreach-centric tactics underperform for developers. ### [H2] Developers prefer hands-on, self-serve education > “They don’t want to be called by an SDR… They actually want to learn by doing.” - Evidence aligns with PLG research and practice. #### ⏱️ [08:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4&t=524) Engaged developer funnel overview - Three pillars: basics, appropriate use, top-of-mind. - Convert programs into acquisition, progression, and re-engagement. ### [H3] Engagement requires three concrete capability signals > “First you want developers to know the basics… know when to use it… and top-of-mind.” - Each pillar maps to measurable actions. #### ⏱️ [10:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4&t=657) Business alignment and scale - CEOs champion engaged developers as deal catalysts. - Treat engaged developers as a company metric. ### [H4] Champions propel deals more than contacts do > “Every deal starts with a passionate engaged developer.” - Champions correlate with adoption and expansion. #### ⏱️ [19:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4&t=1155) Data normalization story - Normalize daily snapshots across APIs into a warehouse. - Favor owned properties for consistent telemetry. ### [H5] High-intent actions beat vanity metrics > “The type of metrics I’m talking about… are high engagement activities.” - Track queries run, course completion, and forum contributions. ## 📚 References - DevRelCon: https://www.devrelcon.dev/ - Neo4j GraphAcademy: https://graphacademy.neo4j.com/ - PLG overview: https://www.productled.org/blog/what-is-product-led-growth - Developer experience best practices: https://segment.com/academy/collecting-data/developer-experience/ - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4 ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - **Paragraph A.** The speaker argues traditional funnels miss how developers learn and evaluate tools. DevRel should track education and capability. ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4)) - **Paragraph B.** Measure engaged developers with three signals. Then align programs and executive reporting to those signals. Use owned telemetry. ## 📰 Newsletter - **Lead.** Developers learn by building, not by inbox nudges. - **Why now.** Boards ask for DevRel impact. Funnels alone fail this moment. - **What to do.** Define “engaged developer” with three signals and ship programs that raise each one. - **Links.** Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4 • PLG: https://www.productled.org/blog/what-is-product-led-growth • DX: https://segment.com/academy/collecting-data/developer-experience/ ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Define engaged developer criteria across docs, training, and product telemetry. - Build workshops that move users from basics to appropriate use. - Publish an engagement dashboard using warehouse snapshots. - Launch community clinics for re-engagement cohorts. #### OSPO - Document event data governance and privacy for telemetry. - Clarify education licensing for course assets and samples. - Establish contributor pathways for curriculum updates. #### Community - Operate mentor circles and peer-led architecture sessions. - Run hackathons with post-event adoption tracking. - Expand forum badges tied to learning milestones. #### WordPress - Training: add capability-based pathways and progress checks. - Playground: craft labs aligned to engaged signals. - Marketing: link case studies to champion stories and time-to-first-success. #### The WPCC - Fund microgrants for course authors and mentors. - Publish transparent impact reports on learning outcomes. ### FAIR - Define provenance for engagement events and audit trails. - Publish a scorecard for high-intent vs vanity metrics. ## 🧪 Hypotheses - Engagement-based programs increase qualified champions by 30% in two quarters. - Workshops double conversion from basics to appropriate use within 60 days. - Re-engagement campaigns lift monthly active developers by 20%. - Normalized telemetry improves forecast accuracy for adoption by 15%. ### 📊 Methodology - Instrument product and training with event schemas. - Run cohort analyses across acquisition, progression, and re-engagement. - Use difference-in-differences to estimate impact of workshops. - Validate champions aga - Summary: tephen from Neo4j shared how DevRel teams often fail to connect with executives because they frame success through a traditional marketing funnel. Drawing from his experience leading DevRel at Neo4j, JFrog, and Oracle, he introduced the “Engaged Developer Funnel” — measuring developers who truly know, use, and keep a technology top of mind. His message: DevRel should focus on building engaged developers, not generating leads, and use those metrics to speak meaningfully to the C-suite and board. See the transcript and more at https://developerrelations.com - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDZxlnk95e4 Thanks so much. And it's it's great to see everyone here at Devril Con. Um what I'm going to talk a bit about is exactly what he was describing. How how do you as a Devril leader talk to the seuite? How do you talk to the CEO? How do you talk to the board of directors? And how do you explain the value of what you do as a Devril expert? Um now I've been speaking and attending conferences for a very long time. Um I was keynoting the stage at um infoip shift last year. Um was just up on stage at AI engineer world's fair where we talked about AI and graph technology and have been doing both personally a lot of developer advocacy because I'm always on the front lines doing this but then also leading teams which are doing this. So I currently lead the team at Neo Forj where we have about a dozen folks doing developer advocate activities. Previously I led the Devril team at Jrog. So um we did DevOps security and um a lot of that and I helped them go through IPO and scale up the Devril team. Again it was about um a dozen people in Devril plus partner marketing plus some open source projects that I ran there. And um I also previous to that ran the developer marketing team at Oracle. So this is a very long journey I've been on. Um back when I started it was technology evangelist. So, I'm I'm dating myself in terms of like how Devril's evolved and now we understand that we're we're advocating for developers. We're not just evangelizing to them. We're not just selling them. And um I I'll start out with a with a personal story. I'm not going to name the company, but um I I built a really strong developer relations team. We had a lot of great activities. We ran a whole conference series. We had forums. We had a lot of metrics and and detailed information about the impact we had on the business and we we thought like our our team our devall team thought we were doing an amazing job for the business. Okay. Now there were some leadership changes in the company. Um not my boss but the the the chief marketing leader left the company. My main advocate in engineering left the company. So there was a little bit of turnover. Um and then I met the the new leader of marketing who who was my kind of indirect boss at one of our events and I I thought I had everything lined up. So we had um if you guys are familiar with him, Ben Venet Supermanium as the keynote speaker. We had a wonderful woman in tech panel and actually the um the chief marketing leader was on the woman in tech panel and talking a bit about her experiences leading a leading tech efforts and um just a really strong lineup with great demos, great engagement with the audience. And I I asked the I asked the marketing leader I'm like well what what did you think of the events? Like like what was your impression of it? She's like well I really like the branding. Okay. So now as a a developer relations leader that makes your heart sink, right? You're like, I've been we've been putting all this work in. We've been like making sure we have the right metrics. We have the right things to to show results from, but we're we're clearly there's a disconnect with leadership on what they value. Okay. So, um, what I'm going to talk a bit about is a different way of thinking about the, um, the marketing funnel and a different way of thinking about how you express what you're doing and what you're accomplishing to leaders. Now, um, this is the traditional marketing funnel. Are folks familiar with this? Right? So, you got like, you know, leads come in, that's kind of high level. Maybe Devril contributes to that. you you qualify leads, they turn to sales qualif opportunities, eventually they turn into a customer. And um you know you know like who doesn't like more customers, right? Yeah, we love more customers. Now the the problem is when when your metrics as a a developer advocate or working in a developer relations organization are tied to this funnel, you are doomed to failure. You you can get a lot more leads simply by doing campaigns and sending blasts out and doing things. Are they quality leads? No. But you get more leads. You can quote, you know, get more MQLs by like sponsoring big events like reinvent or just pushing people through the funnel. So there at every single stage there is a more coste effective way to accomplish the the marketing funnel than developer relations. Now there is a value to developer relations and that's because the way people learn the way developers learn is very different than the marketing funnel. But there's a different way of thinking about this which is what we do as developer relations people is we build engaged developers. And when I say engaged developer what I mean is I mean somebody who who who knows the technology. Oh here's the funny slides. Okay, let's take a break from the actual talk and do funny slides. Okay, lead genen. So, this is this is kind of a funny take on on you know how you might think about um different parts of marketing organization, but for generating leads, there's the top of the funnel, right? If the light bulb broken, bring in more light bulbs and more and more. So, there are better ways to get leads than simply actually engaging with developers. Um, another example of this is content marketing. So, I apologize if I'm offending anybody who's in a product marketing organization. If the light bulb's broken, you no idea to fix it. Writes a 2000word experts guide on changing a light bulb. Probably AI generated now. Okay. And then let this is the ultimate marketing tool, Candy Crush. Um, and it goes with the fun joke about marketing people convincing a light and goes back to playing Candy Crush. Okay, sorry about that. Now, how do developers actually learn? So, one way that developers learn is by doing by actually like being hands-on learning technology. And if you have a a free version of your product, if you have like like tutorials or guides online, this is actually how developers want to learn. They don't want to be like called on a by a SDR. They don't want to be harassed at a booth. They actually want to learn by doing things hands-on. developers also learn by taking classes or workshops or guided content, right? So, this is another really effective way to learn and you can think about like this often happens at um online workshops. You can do them in person at different events and people walk away accelerated learning and being able to walk away using the product and understanding how to do it. Um they learn from each other. So often in um architecture sessions, in whiteboarding sessions with their peers or colleagues who they um know and love, they'll also learn in settings like this. And then finally, um hackathons are a great way to to learn. Um our our folks, John loves hackathons. So big round of applause for MLH who put on this event. And again, this is a really effective way of learning because you you give them the tools, you give them the technologies, you give them actual problems to solve, and then it's fun because you get prizes, you get awards for doing it. It's a great way of learning. These are the ways developers actually want to learn. And you notice it's not leads. It's not just throwing sales reps at people. It's actually um learning by doing it. And this also means that the way we need to communicate about this is different. So here is an example of an engaged developer funnel and the way of thinking about it. So first you want developers to to know the basics. They have to know when to use the technology kind of how it works accomplish simple tasks knowing when and when not to use it. Now this is important because for every technology there are suitable applications and there are things you should never ever use it for because you will fail like 90% of the use cases for AI today. So if you teach people when to use a technology and what it's good for, they'll be successful. And if we teach them when not to use it, they won't misapply it and they won't recommend other people use it for projects where they can't be successful. And then making sure the technology is top of- mind is also important. So like having some touch points or re-engagement where they can see the technology they can continue to engage on it. Um, as an example of how we applied this at Neo Forj for us, knowing the basics was using Graph Academy and learning a course, which is our online free training, or using Aura, which is the free cloud version of our product. for knowing when and when for knowing when to use it and when not to use it. We considered people who taken an advanced course, a intermediate or advanced graph academy course as um knowing when and when not to use it or running a certain number of queries in Aura where we actually measure what they're doing and do unique queries. And then finally, top of mind was like, you know, clicking on an email, reading our newsletter, coming to our community forums, all those activities. And when they meet all three of these principles, they're considered an engaged developer. And there's a bunch of ways now that we have a a categorization for what an engaged developer is. And we have specific metrics around how to measure it, which would probably be different for your business than ours, but you can see how it's a general framework you can apply. Then you can look at how you can increase the number of engaged developers for the business in a targeted way. So one way would be getting more acquisition. So if somebody doesn't know the basic, doesn't know when to use it, and isn't top of mind and they appear in the engaged developer funnel, now they're an acquired developer. And you could do this by getting more people into the funnel, by reaching out to different communities, by promoting in meetups. Those will all get you acquisition. Progression would be if they know the basics and now you're helping them to know when to use it. Re-engagement would be they already know how to use it and when not to use it, but you haven't seen them for a while. So maybe they've dropped off your radar or they've stopped using the technology and maybe at a future job they might apply it. Product education would be it's top of mind. So they're showing up in your marketing signals, but they've never actually done something that shows that they're an expert in the products. That's an education activity. And then if you're maintaining them, then you can improve the overall number of engaged developers long term. Okay. Now with this framework in mind, now you can start to have discussions with different people in your organization. So one example of people who you can talk to about this is your board of directors who who regularly chats with their their board of directors for their company. Okay, not many people in this company. Um, now this is one one thing which I I learned the hard way from the the previous example I gave of failure is every company where I've taken a Devril job since then, I've had interviewed with and had a relationship with the CEO and leadership. And this is something extremely important. If you if you don't can't explain to these people about what you're doing and what the impact is, there's no possible way you can contribute to the long-term success of the organization. And um this engaged developer funnel actually was something that the CEO is very passionate about. Actually, this isn't our CEO. This this is our CEO, Emil. But it's something which he can actually talk to the whole organization and he can explain what the contribution of Devril is to getting engaged developers, how we're doing to hit the targets. It's actually a companywide metric for improving the number of engaged developers. And something which every good tech CEO who I've worked for knows is that if every deal starts with a passionate engaged developer. If you actually look into it, it's it's not the contact in Salesforce. It's not even maybe even the person in Marquetto who you're tracking, but there's somebody who's really really passionate about your technology at the company. They're championing it. They're the one behind the deal on the customer side and that's your engaged developer which um Emil and which all these folks in the um seuite that's the person who they want to see and they want to get more of those people so they can improve the throughput of their company and then hopefully and this is an actual slide I've I've redacted some of the information for from um our company um this was in our our quarterly all hands for the first quarter of this year we had a target for a number of engaged developers we were going to hit. We had a couple sources for it. Um, and then our graph academy specifically was over twice what the target was. And this is something which is easy for developer relations to control because it's something where it's education, it's content for developers and it's a way of driving more education of the product. And you can see year-over-year we're actually driving growth and scale to the company in a way which influences the sales numbers. Okay. And we'll we'll we'll eventually get to the next slide. Okay. So, hopefully we're not getting chased by metrics from other teams like the the marketing funnel, like being responsible for directly attributing customers and sales because those are all um in my opinion antiatterns for success with Devril. And hopefully we can actually drive to success by filtering and pulling the good parts out of the engaged developer funnel to improve the quality and what we're doing for our organizations. So, thank you guys very much for coming to my talk on the engaged developer funnel. And I intentionally left a little bit of extra time at the end so we could do Q&A with the audience and kind of talk a bit more about what you guys are doing. Now um for this Q&A format you can ask a question but first you have to tell a story about what you're doing in your company and it can be either a story of success or a story of failure. So anybody anybody have any comments questions or things which they want to chat about with the rest of us Devril professionals. Okay. And um while I I kind of teed up a big ask for everybody. We we do have a mic in the back for folks who who want to chat and have a question. And um you know I think that in my experience um being able to talk to and like like have conversations with the executive stakeholders is very important. Now what I'd really like to see is not only us finding ways where we can come up with the right message and the right metrics for those but also better education of the seauite. I think that every company, especially tech companies, relies heavily upon developer engagement. They all understand it's important. They get told by their their investors actually. Um, we recently got a big investor who asked us what were our metrics and how were we contributing to developer relations success because they wanted that as a as a somebody putting money into the company. And if the board of directors is getting asked that and they don't know how to answer, then we fundamentally have an education problem at the seauite. So I'd love to see more seale people sitting at conferences like this like Devrocon. Okay. So anybody want to raise their hand and yeah share a story and ask a question. >> Great. Uh my name is Chaitan and I'm an AI founder and we're building um a marketplace of monetized MCP servers. So so we found a way to monetize MCP. Um and so the question I have is is that um we're just starting out and we have some ideas around our go to market and the target user groups. Um but we have to kind of figure it out and so we need Devril to be not just engaging with dev with developers but also being part of the go to market strategy of figuring out which developers we should even engage and I'm curious if you had any thoughts about that. >> Yeah. Okay. So that's a great question and um congrats and thanks for sharing the story of your company. give him a big round of applause. Okay. And um like I'm going to preface this by um kind of saying I think it's really important at different stages of the company that you you think about and you look at developer relations in different ways. So um like for startups often a developer advocate or somebody running Devril is is a early hire because that's your first and most effective go to market right like you you have a new product you're spreading by word of mouth you're getting folks excited about it and um often even um leadership like the CTO or like somebody in the C staff ends up serving that role as quote you know developer advocate and being out there and talking to prospective customers. Um, also when you're a small company, a startup, the people you talk to are much much closer to the buyer, right? So I think in your case with MCP servers, especially since it's a new tech, like a lot of teams are adopting it, they would actually have to push and be the buying persona in the organization as well because there's not like a a big infrastructure team which is going to suddenly buy it or there's not like an executive who's going to sponsor it. Um so in in your case I think that the alignment between Devril and go to market is is higher and you you can actually roll them into a marketing motion because your buying persona and your developer persona is closer. Now, as you hit a larger company, like if you're doing a um around 700 people around 100 million ARR, then what you're going to see is you're going to see that your your influencers are typically not your buying persona, right? So, there's kind of this split and most folks in Devril, I would say, fall into that category where they're they're in that size company or a little bit larger unless you're in a startup situation. Um, and that's the case where applying the typical marketing funnel and metrics is quite challenging because your buying persona and your developer have now split. And then when you get to very large, so I thought I was getting told I was out of time. When you get to very large organizations, then you have a different challenge, which is you have to grow communities and grow users at scale. And that's where a lot of the metrics which the previous speaker and other folks were talking about for like the size of your community alignment with other teams is is really important. So it depends on the size of your company and I think in your case like there is a very close alignment with the go to market motion. Okay. Excellent question. I think we have time for one more question and story. Somebody wants to go. Yeah. I you were every number and uh and then my boss asked if I could automate it and you know I first started trying with the APIs and doing like a search on date ranges. So, I want to know 30 days. Give me the metrics from YouTube. Now, go to the next API. I gave you the last 30 days. They all have a different format for date filters. It's a mess. So, what I ended up doing is getting only the current value, not a range, but just what's what are we at today from every single like 15 different data points, save all that to a database, and now it's all normalized. I can do a single date query against that row or or multiple rows. So it it puts all the data in a format where it's really easy to get averages and totals and things you can't do through a REST API. Um so that's how I do how we're doing metrics. Uh my question is on that chart that you had where you were showing like an engaged developer. I'm curious how you measure that at scale with like hundreds or thousands of developers. How do you know that you're they're keeping you top of mind? How do you know that they're engaged? Like >> Yeah. Okay. >> How do you measure that in >> Great great question. Thanks for the story. So um let me let me answer the question and then I'll I'll I'll kind of also pose pose a challenge for folks to think about that the type of metrics they're collecting. So um the the metrics I showed they're all collected using BigQuery. Um they're coming from systems which um are relatively under our control. So our cloud-based environments and our training academy. And so it's it's not a reflection of of all the engaged developers. We do have other sources like our like our community forums. We do a lot of outreach on external platforms but it's a good proxy for those because there are owned communities which we can measure and we can track easily. Now the the other thing which um I think is worth thinking about is the type of metrics I'm talking about for um things where they're high engagement activities where folks are are learning they're firing queries they're actually like like doing um things you can track versus um metrics where you're track results of like you know how many views are we getting how many attendees are we getting um how many folks are coming to our platforms the the former like An engaged metric I think is much more valuable to the seauite because those people are the folks who are potentially luminaries and champions and folks who they're going to see in sales deals and accounts down the road. Um what you're tracking is valuable but not as meaningful up the chain. So like it's hard to just support a devroll organization and the the costs and the investments on it purely off an everinccreasing scale of like we're getting more visibility, more attention, more eyeballs but without the results that correlate with that. Okay. So with that I want to thank everyone for coming to my talk here., The engaged developer funnel, Dev Rel, 01k75wmfp0dm75y67szvvsj54q.