The Golden Triangle of Great Developer Experience
When it comes to increasing developer adoption of your product, developer experience is key. Too often, I see companies spend the majority of their time and focus on getting a developer to sign up, and not enough time on keeping them. If a developer tries your product and struggles to get started, or finds that it doesn’t use the latest patterns or frameworks, they will find another product that does. It is that simple.
I have lost count of the introductory emails or messages from potential clients of The DevRel Collective who realized that despite strong signups, their developer retention wasn’t growing. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s time to shift some of your energy towards improving the developer experience.
So how do you quickly improve developer experience to change the retention trend? In my spare time, I’m a passionate photographer. In photography, there is a notion called the golden triangle of a great photo. To get the perfect, tack-sharp picture, you have to learn to balance shutter speed, focal depth, and iso which controls light sensitivity. Adjusting one setting, impacts the other. Finding the right balance between these is the key to a great photo. Just like photography, there is a golden triangle of great developer experience.
Living Documentation
Developers need clear, well organized and up to date documentation. Material should be organized around the developer lifecycle: getting started, building and integrating, and managing. Make sure your API and reference material includes inline code examples that developers can copy and paste, or test immediately. Provide a developer playground or codesandbox for them to get hands-on. Organize your tutorials in learning paths, from getting started to more advanced use cases that help developers integrate with related technology. Finally, include material to help developers manage a live app, whether it is staying atop of billing and usage, or understand the impact of new features and releases.
At Twilio, we treated documentation as a product. We had release cycles, and even allowed developers to rate pages, leave feedback, and create pull requests via GitHub. Separate developer documentation from product releases to ensure you can constantly ship new guides and tutorials without waiting for product release cycles. Many companies such as Snowflake and ThoughtSpot utilize tools like claat to generate user-friendly guides from markdown and output them to multiple channels. Keeping your docs in markdown also make it incredibly easy for your community to contribute updates, changes, and new content.
Speed of Integration
Developers need to ship solutions. They will gravitate to products that solve their problem using modern tools, frameworks and patterns, and integrate well with their existing devops toolchains. If you product solves a problem, but introduces friction into your release process, you will have an uphill battle growing retention. Table stakes are SDKs in popular languages, but great developer experience also means those SDKs should use language specific patterns and best practices, and not generated code. The same SDKs should be available popular dependency management tools like cocoapods, pip, or npm.
Spend the time to integrate your product natively into tools developers already use, in particular VS Code. A great example is Figma, a tool historically targeted for Designers, recently launch a set of Developer tools called Dev Mode. To ensure Developers could use these tools, Figma also launched a VS Code plugin to remove friction.
Transparency of Management
Building and integrating your product is only part of the story. Retaining developers is heavily impacted by how well they manage your product in production. It may be as simple as access to API keys, but should improve deployment pipelines, manage API endpoints, and help Developers stay atop of usage and consumption, and make billing transparent. Further, the more proactive you can product can be to help ensure app heath or reduce consumption costs, the more sticky your product will be. Heroku is a master at app health transparency.
Summary
Developers can be a fickle audience. They will change frameworks or products when something better, which solves their problem quicker, comes along. Great developer-first companies prioritize developer experience and retention above everything else. Whether you spend time improving documentation, speed of integration, or management capabilities, developers will appreciate it.
The best Developer brands in the world know that the difference between good and great developer experience is how they balance the golden triangle. Put simply, if you improve your documentation, without also improving speed of integration as an example, you will see some developer growth in the short term, but will quickly notice friction in the build phase. Rising support tickets, or chatter on slack and developer forums are a sure sign that your golden triangle is out of balance. Just like in photography, you need to make adjustments to each aspect to nail that perfect picture and go from developer experience to developer love.