We recently posed the question to the CodeProject.com audience: “How often do you shoot down product tool choices your manager / team lead presents to your team?". From this, we learned that 34.5% of the developers who responded very often, often, or occasionally reject the choices the purchaser has already made. In addition, approximately 30% never have to reject a product from on high because they choose their own tools! However, this first survey did not dig into the reasons why developers had rejected or disliked tool selections made by their manager, team lead, or other leaders in their organization. [...]

Calling Them What? And that is the question. If you are marketing to developers, you already know that there is no generic “developer.” Undoubtedly, your tool or service is meant to be wielded by a very specific developer persona. But thanks to DevOps, that persona may be employing multiple tools. So when your persona also identifies as DevOps, what does that mean? Why should you care? To understand this, Developer Media posed a very simple question on CodeProject.com: “Are you a DevOps engineer?” Yes, But... At least one developer responded, “Yes, but I don’t want to be one.” Harrr. [...]

Why Market to Developers? Maybe your product’s customer is actually a CIO. Maybe the purchasing team sits on the business side of the house. Maybe developers aren’t even really your customer, you just need to convince their company’s C-suite to build a product with your API and put that on their product development map. So, why should you pay attention to developers? It turns out that they are often part of the decision making unit.  Our survey of a developer community results showed that 60% of developers have the ability to approve or reject a tool purchase.  We asked  a [...]