How to create and audit your core developer journey

When I work with dev tool startups, one of the first things I want to understand is the core developer journey for their product.

I am not talking about creating some 79-page pdf explaining every touchpoint, for every persona involved in the buying process, throughout the 24-month product lifecycle.

I am talking about knowing what the experience a typical dev would have as they go through a typical developer path:

they heard about you on Reddit,
went to your site,
signed up/downloaded,
got something running,
understood the value you give,
and said: “ok, I’m trying this at work”.

There are common actions/events/scenarios that devs will go through. There are metrics that you want to look at for each stage. There are methods for running those developer experience audits. And I share all that below.

I’ll talk about:

Stages of the developer journey (Discover, Start, Activate, Convert, Scale)
Core developer journey (subset of the above, crucial for early stage startups)
Core developer journey audit and template
Resources I liked around this topic

After reading this and going through the audit/template you should have a solid understanding of what needs to be adjusted/created/changed/fixed. If not you can always reach out and I’ll go through it with you.

Let’s go.

Stages of the developer journey

I like to use the framework coming from The Developer-Focused Go-To-Market Playbook.

Discover, Start, Activate, Convert, Scale.

It works best for SaaS dev tools, or OSS projects with the SaaS/hosted version. If you are running top-down sales you may want to use something else.

The following is my interpretation of what happens at each stage: what is the goal, metrics/KPIs to measure it, and example actions you may want to take to drive it.

Discover:

Goal: Get people to your website
Metrics: Homepage traffic
Example actions: Figure out where your audience hangs out and become visible there, either through paid or organic means. Understand their typical workflows and roadblocks and interject (Google search).

Start:

Goal: Get people to your product
Metrics: Sign up / Try for free
Example actions: Get users interested enough to try. Templates, examples, interactive demos, playgrounds can help. Use-case focused content (JTBD content) can also help drive those actions.

Activate

Goal: Get people to extract value from your product
Metrics: Activation / Habit moment
Example actions: Get a user or team to form a habit. Continuously use the product and get value from it. Activation event should correlate with that (mid-term retention)

Convert:

Goal: Get people to pay for the value they are getting
Metrics: Paying customer/Closed won
Example actions: Get an account/company to pay for the product. Typically at a single team level. Could be amplified by sales reaching out to buyer personas from active accounts (product-led-sales)

Scale:

Goal: Get people to extract more value and pay for it
Metrics: Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Depth of usage
Example actions: Grow number API calls, seats, teams using the product of seats, teams using product. Sales team approaches buyer personas to upgrade people from team to enterprise.

How does this translate to the core developer journey? Let me explain.

Core developer journey

Now, the journey stages above work for a 10-person startup that is finding initial traction, for a 100-person scale-up in the revenue growth stage, and for a 1000-person enterprise that is continuing steady growth.

I work mostly with early-stage startups and I look at it through that lens. And for them not all of those stages are as important. At an early stage, I believe you should nail Discover->Start->Activation before you do anything else.

But even more than that. You should nail a subset of that journey, a single path that is very common with devs. In its simplest form, it is:

I heard about you on Reddit/Conference/Friend
I Googled the company name
Went to the website, read a bit
Clicked-out to docs, read a bit
Checked out pricing
Signed up for the free product
Went through the quickstart
Got interested in exploring more

There is more to this of course, but if this path is really nice and smooth you are golden.

Founder of one of my favorite dev tools, Modal, talked about how they focused on optimizing that first experience in this podcast:

‍

Core Developer Journey Audit and Template

I listed typical steps/events that the developer goes through in each stage. You should go over all of these and describe my questions/frustrations/frictions at each stage. If a particular step doesn’t apply to your product/situation skip it and/or add a comment if you are building it right now.

A tool I like to use for auditing this is a friction log, something I learned about when working with a growth advisor myself.

Based on that experience you should be able to create a core set of moments at each step that you care about and want to have metrics for. And a core set of assets that you need to build/improve to support it.

Here is a Google Doc template I use to go through this together with my clients. There are some videos in there too for context. ‍

Core Developer Journey Template Google Doc

Here are the questions/events/moments relevant to each stage. Again, unless you feel you more-or-less nailed the journey to activation, don’t move to Convert/Scale.

Discover:

Sees your product on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Blog, meetup and get interested
Googles a problem and lands on your blog
Googles your company

Start:

Reads the homepage
Goes to the pricing page
Goes to the docs
Signs up for the free plan/trial/waitlist etc

Activate:

Follows quickstart/getting started
Looks for examples/templates of his use cases
Tries to integrate into his project
Looks for integrations with his stack
Hits roadblocks, looks for support
Searches docs for error (also in google)
Looks for support community
Signs up to support community and asks the first question
Submits an issue on GitHub
Explores courses, deeper tutorials, or video guides
Invites team member
Lost interest, didn’t find answer, got distracted, and realized it was not for me now.

‍Convert:

Visited pricing multiple times or by multiple people
Visited terms of service multiple times
Started inviting multiple team members
Grew usage significantly
Visited multiple “vs competitor” pages
Visits upgrade site

Scale:

I started getting closer to the singe-team limits.
There are multiple single teams from the same company signed up

Next steps

Ok, now go ahead and work on that Google Doc template, run friction logs of your core journey, and figure out where the obvious problems are, what needs to be changed, and what needs to be built,

If you hit roadblocks or would like to get help -> reach out, happy to go through that with you.

Resources

Hey, I am Jakub Czakon. CMO at a dev tool startup, dev marketing advisor, admin of a dev marketing Slack, and creator of the dev marketing newslepear. I share insights from my experience, research, and talking to other practitioners.