I like to tell stories. In particular, I like to tell stories about how to help developers be successful.

Most of the time, my work is behind the scenes – organizing the events, writing the sessions/posts, or sketching out the storyline that the team will bring to life. And most of my recent presentations have been done internally. But every so often, I’ve had the honor to speak at an event or write.

Publications

Book Cover - 'The Essential Guide to Developer Marketing and Relations

Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide
‘Using Developer Personas to Stay Customer-Obsessed’

For this book, I contributed the chapter on audience-centricity via developer personas. The work followed many years of using personas while working as a Product Marketing Manager on Windows Phone, Windows, and Microsoft Azure.

The chapter explores what is a developer persona, how it differs from a user segment, and how to put them into practice. The chapter includes some examples from my Window 10 days.

Presentations of Note

I’ve also presented at many Developer Marketing events. Below are some of my favorite talks.

  • The Power of Three: DevRel, Product Marketing, and Technical Product Marketing
    Product Marketing Alliance; Sept 2023; presented with Priya Ramamurthi
    Priya and I explored how Product Marketing can/should approach developers as part of enterprise-led funnels and PLG-led funnels — and the parts played by three roles (DevRel, PMM, and TPMs) in each of those funnels.
  • How Developers Break Traditional Marketing Theory (…and why you should too!)
    EDC Developer Marketing Summit; Sept 2019
    I explored why traditional one-way/one-time marketing funnels don’t work to developers, and why a cyclical adoption approach makes more sense. At the end, I also propose how this cyclical approach (discover -> explore -> adopt) can align with traditional marketing KPIs.
  • Four Generations of Developer Personas
    SlashData Future Developer Summit; June 2019
    After the Dev Marketing and Relations Essential Guide released, personas became a topic I spoke on semi-regularly. This talk explored some work we were doing in Azure at the time – creating three ‘cloud developer personas’ that were intended to be generalized and able to be used across companies and products. At the event, I spoke with a few companies about developing these into shared ‘industry personas,’ nothing ever came of the effort.
  • Virtual Event ROI: Experiments and Learning
    EDC Developer Marketing Summit; Sept 2018
    Desiree and I did our first ‘developers break funnels’ talk, building upon a ‘model by a ‘broken funnel’ model created by a colleague of mine, Rob Caron. In the talk, we explore three different virtual events (caveat: this was pre-COVID) and the expressed ROI from each of them.

Recent Content for Work

Lastly, here is one of my favorite recent public-facing works:

How Development Teams Purchase SaaS | 2023

This video, and the whitepaper it promotes, explores the changing patterns in how developer teams purchase and integrate SaaS components/services, and the outlook on upcoming trends (including AI).

Although I had worked on a number of similar whitepapers before, this was my first time being in front of a camera like this. It was a lot of fun!