Developer advocacy has evolved from a grassroots community movement into a strategic discipline that sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and marketing. But as organizations mature, many advocates still wrestle with fundamental questions: How do you measure impact? How do you scale community engagement without losing authenticity? And how will AI reshape how developers learn and adopt new tools?

InfoQ recently sat down with Mary Thengvall, a longtime practitioner and leader in developer relations and program management, to unpack these questions. Our conversation explored how advocacy has changed over the years, the balance between storytelling and metrics, and the new challenges AI introduces for both content and community.

The Accidental Advocate

Like many in DevRel, Mary didn’t start there intentionally.

“It wasn’t really a defined role when I began,” she recalls. “I was working at O’Reilly Media, asking questions like: Are we producing the right content? Are our conferences addressing what people actually need?”

Those questions evolved into what became the company’s first structured approach to community management—long before “DevRel” was a common title.

“I started by simply asking developers what they wanted to learn, what trends they were following, and what resources actually helped them. That curiosity—listening to the audience and responding with useful resources—became the foundation for everything that followed.”

Even now, in a program management role, that same mindset drives her work.

“Whether it’s building or managing strategic projects, the goal is the same: make sure people have what they need to succeed.”

Journalism, Empathy, and Product Thinking

Before tech, Mary studied journalism—something she credits with shaping her approach to advocacy.

“Journalism trains you to ask why people care about something, to find the human angle. That translates perfectly into developer relations. You’re still telling stories—but in a way that helps people solve problems.”

That empathy and curiosity also mirror product management principles: deeply understanding the user and their “jobs to be done.”

“If you can understand the human behind the code—their frustrations, motivations, and goals—you’ll always create better products and better content.”

Measuring Success Without Losing the Plot

DevRel’s toughest question is still: How do you measure success?

“It depends on what the company needs,” Mary says. “Early-stage teams might care about reach and awareness. Mature organizations focus more on retention, adoption, or reducing support load. There isn’t one metric—it’s about aligning to the company’s priorities at that moment.”

The hardest part, she adds, is resisting vanity metrics.

“A tutorial that addresses a common forum question might result in fewer questions about that feature, but can you prove causation? Usually not. We often deal with correlation, and that’s okay. What matters is that your work clearly supports business and user goals.”

That nuance, she says, is what often gets lost when DevRel is treated purely as a marketing function.

“When the focus shifts to traffic or impressions, you risk missing the point. Developer relations isn’t about noise—it’s about trust and sustained engagement.”

Marketing Goals vs. Developer Trust

Balancing authenticity with organizational goals remains a recurring challenge.

“Sales and marketing teams often focus on decision-makers, while DevRel speaks to practitioners—the people actually using the tools,” Mary explains. “I like to frame it as accounts versus individuals. Marketing targets accounts; DevRel supports individuals. Both are valuable, but the mindset is very different.”

Developers are quick to detect inauthenticity, so maintaining that distinction is essential.

“You build credibility by being useful. If the content genuinely helps developers solve a problem, they’ll remember that far more than a campaign slogan.”

Building Scalable, Authentic Content

When asked what types of content have proven most effective, Mary emphasizes diversity and reuse.

“People learn differently—some prefer videos, others prefer tutorials or live demos. I like creating what I call a content kit: start with a demo or sample app, document it, write a tutorial, record a walkthrough, maybe turn it into a talk or a podcast. You’re repurposing a single project into multiple formats.”

This approach expands reach without burning out the team.

“We measured what we could control. Our goal wasn’t always to publish—sometimes it was just to produce a content kit and hand it off to the team responsible for publishing. That kept expectations realistic while still showing progress.”

Lessons from Community Building

Community management is often the most rewarding—and the most difficult—part of developer advocacy.

“At Camunda, we ran both a Slack community and a Discourse forum. Slack was great early on—fast feedback, strong engagement—but as the community grew, it became unsustainable. The same questions came up repeatedly, and the answers weren’t searchable.”

The team made the difficult decision to shut down Slack and focus on Discourse.

“Engineers loved Slack because it felt personal. But long-term, a searchable, open forum was better for accessibility and sustainability. It wasn’t a popular decision, but it was the right one.”

That experience reinforced an important truth: sometimes the healthiest community decisions are the least popular ones.

“You can’t please everyone, but you can prioritize transparency and accessibility. That’s what lasts.”

Reporting Lines and Cross-Team Collaboration

For DevRel to be effective, it has to bridge multiple functions—engineering, product, marketing, and sales.

“I reported to the CTO, which gave me direct visibility into product discussions—roadmaps, feature trade-offs, customer pain points. That made it easier to anticipate questions from users and feed insights back to the team.”

At the same time, she stayed in sync with marketing and customer success to ensure alignment on messaging and outcomes.

“DevRel really sits at the hub of all those spokes. You have to build trust internally, not just externally.”

AI as an Assistant, Not a Replacement

With generative AI accelerating technical content creation, we discussed its role in DevRel.

“AI is amazing for overcoming ‘blank page syndrome,’” Mary says. “I’ll often use ChatGPT to draft an outline, summarize documentation, or generate a checklist. But you still need a human in the loop to verify accuracy and context.”

She once used AI to condense complex migration documentation into a concise checklist—then had engineers review it for correctness.

“It saved time, but it didn’t replace expertise.”

The Future of Discovery and API Adoption

Developers are already using AI tools to interact with documentation and troubleshoot APIs. Mary believes this trend will reshape how teams think about discoverability.

“It’s a bit like SEO. AI assistants pull from what’s already well-structured and visible online. So if your docs and examples are clean, discoverable, and current, your product will show up in those answers.”

Right now, though, she sees AI affecting how developers learn more than where they learn.

“People might skip the forum and just ask an LLM—but that LLM is still pulling from those forums. The consumption pattern changes, but the underlying knowledge sources don’t—at least not yet.”

What Makes a Great API Experience

When it comes to adoption, Mary believes the fundamentals haven’t changed.

“A great API is intuitive. It gets developers to value quickly and minimizes confusion. Every additional question—‘What does this parameter mean?’ ‘Why isn’t this call working?’—adds friction.”

The best developer experiences, she says, prioritize simplicity and fast feedback loops.

“Clear documentation, quick-start guides, sample apps—those are still the biggest levers. Anything that shortens time-to-value increases trust and retention.”

Avoiding an AI Echo Chamber

Looking ahead, Mary sees both promise and peril in how AI will shape developer marketing and content.

“The risk is that we stop creating new ideas. These models learn from the past, so if we’re not careful, we’ll just keep remixing what’s already out there.”

The real opportunity, she says, lies in pairing AI efficiency with human originality.

“The people who thrive will be the ones who use AI to accelerate workflows—but still bring their own insight, creativity, and lived experience. That’s what will set future content apart.”

Transitioning from DevRel to Program Management

Today, Mary is a program manager for strategic projects at Camunda, coordinating cross-functional initiatives across the company.

“It’s less about direct advocacy and more about ensuring teams have the resources and feedback loops they need,” she explains. “But the mindset is the same—help people succeed, remove friction, and communicate clearly.”

That through-line—from journalism to community management to program leadership—reflects what might be DevRel’s greatest lesson: the importance of curiosity and empathy in every technical discipline.

“At its core, developer relations is about listening and connecting. Whether you’re writing code, managing programs, or creating content, that human focus never really changes.”

“QCon stood out as the best of many worlds. It has a very strong attendee base of people who return year after year because it matters to them—people who come back to learn. It has a strong developer focus, with most attendees being senior-level developers who can make decisions about the technology they actually use, yet remain open-minded because they’re here to learn. That means you get people who are committed to taking something valuable away, rather than just saying, ‘I attended because I got a ticket.’

At QCon, we meet people tackling complicated problems and working at larger scales. The key thing is that you get a technically deep, outcome-focused crowd. To be honest, QCon was a shaping experience for me. When I was a junior developer, I watched the talks online and learned from some of the greats in the industry. As I moved up and began running DevRel teams, QCon was the first event I actively decided to sponsor because of how valuable it had been to me as an engineer, and how much it could contribute to building out my teams and my career.”

– Ben Gamble, Field CTO, Ververica

“Yeah, I think ING has such a strong technology DNA, characteristic, and brand that we need to be in places like this to make it clear that we’re committed to this community, to these subjects, and that we are truly an active part of the tech sector—especially the deep engineering side of it. This is a conference that is profoundly technical in depth. I don’t see many vendors here trying to sell pie in the sky. I don’t see many people talking about things they don’t actually do themselves. That’s invaluable, because you get real, hands-on experience here. If I had to describe QCon in a single word, it would probably be ‘innovative.’”
– Daniele Tonella, CTO, ING

“Our company's name is Akka, and we specialize in building software that enables organizations to build systems at scale. I’ve noticed that at QCon, there are a lot of architects and IT decision-makers focused on how to design and build systems—and that’s right in our purview. Our ideal customer is a Fortune 1,000 or Fortune 5,000 company, and someone who understands they may need assistance solving challenging problems and is interested in approaching them from the right perspective. QCon brings together exactly that type of person. I would highly encourage you to become a QCon sponsor. I think the investment is worth it. At QCon, we consistently get both quantity and quality—large numbers of leads, with the vast majority being highly qualified.” – Duncan DeVore, Sr. Director, Architect, and AI Advocate, Akka

To introduce a complex new architectural concept and strengthen its brand with software architects, the Akka team turned to two of the most trusted names in developer education and media: O'Reilly Media and InfoQ. Through a coordinated campaign that blended O'Reilly’s deep technical content with InfoQ’s reach and reputation among senior software decision-makers, Akka successfully drove awareness, qualified leads, and long-term pipeline growth.

The Challenge

Akka needed a way to educate a highly technical audience—application architects—about a new architectural paradigm. This required content that was both deeply technical and vendor-neutral, presented in a format and on platforms that this audience respects and trusts.

The Solution

Akka partnered with O’Reilly Media to develop high-quality, long-form assets including a technical guide and a live webinar. These materials were then strategically promoted across the InfoQ network, leveraging its highly targeted audience of senior software professionals.

The strategy included:

• Sponsoring the O’Reilly Software Architecture Superstream, which garnered over 3,000 registrants and 600+ live attendees.

• Promoting the O’Reilly-authored content through InfoQ direct email campaigns, on-site placements, and retargeting ads, generating over 2,700 leads and counting

• Sponsoring topically-related InfoQ webinars - which include a practitioner-led Q&A - generating over 1,200 registrants

• Using a mix of gated and ungated distribution, ensuring both broad awareness and lead capture.

The Results

• High-quality leads: The campaigns reached precisely the audience Akka was targeting—application architects who recognize and trust both the O’Reilly and InfoQ brands.

• Pipeline influence: While attribution is shared, Akka confidently reports that these campaigns contributed to both new business and upsell opportunities.

• Content longevity: While webinars were typically used for one quarter, detailed reports remained relevant for up to a year, maximizing ROI.

• Brand credibility: O’Reilly’s reputation for unbiased, real-world technical content paired seamlessly with InfoQ’s reach to reinforce Akka’s credibility.

Why InfoQ + O'Reilly?

• O’Reilly content is known for its depth, neutrality, and relevance—traits that resonate with technical audiences.

• InfoQ’s platform amplifies that content to a highly curated audience, ensuring it reaches the right people at the right time.

Key Takeaways

• Combining InfoQ and O’Reilly creates a powerful marketing engine for technical products.

• Content must be high-value and vendor-neutral to resonate with senior developers and architects.

• Shared attribution is the right mindset: no single asset or campaign closes a deal, but their cumulative effect is significant.

• Flexibility and long-term planning allow for smarter use of budgets—choosing when to invest more in content creation vs. promotion.

“InfoQ and O’Reilly are as good as peanut butter and jelly for software architects.” — Darin, Akka Marketing Team

Supercharge Your Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

Looking to connect with senior software engineers, architects, and decision-makers? Discover how O’Reilly’s expert content creation and InfoQ’s highly engaged technical audience can help you drive brand awareness and maximize demand generation.

Let’s talk! Connect with Sharon Cordesse (scordesse@oreilly.com) and Bethany Vananda (Bethany.Vananda@c4media.com) to explore how this partnership can elevate your marketing strategy. Schedule a time to chat today!

The Challenge DoiT needed authoritative, long-form technical content to drive demand generation campaigns but lacked the internal resources to develop such content at scale. Additionally, they required a distribution channel that would effectively reach their target audience of senior software engineers and technical decision-makers.

The Solution: Partnering with O’Reilly and InfoQ DoiT turned to O’Reilly for high-quality technical eBooks and reports, leveraging them as gated assets in their marketing efforts. To maximize their reach and engagement, DoiT distributed this content through InfoQ’s native digital advertising and syndication programs.

By utilizing O’Reilly content on InfoQ, DoiT was able to:

• Offer high-value gated content that resonated with their technical audience.

• Leverage O’Reilly’s strong brand recognition to encourage lead generation.

• Align follow-up messaging with the specific interests of prospects based on the content they engaged with.

Performance & Results DoiT’s InfoQ campaigns featuring O’Reilly content consistently delivered strong performance metrics:

• High Engagement: Click-through rates (CTR) on O’Reilly content were consistently strong within InfoQ campaigns.

• Effective Lead Generation: Senior software influencers and technical decision-makers were more likely to fill out lead forms for O’Reilly eBooks compared to other content types.

• Proven ROI: DoiT has now sponsored five O’Reilly books, recognizing their continued effectiveness as demand generation assets.

Why O’Reilly Content? DoiT originally explored third-party content solutions for demand generation and tested multiple providers. O’Reilly content outperformed other vendors in both engagement and lead quality. Internally, DoiT engineers were already familiar with and valued O’Reilly books, reinforcing the decision to use them in marketing campaigns.

Additionally, producing similar long-form technical content in-house would have required significant time and resources. By sponsoring O’Reilly content, DoiT was able to focus its internal team on creating complementary content such as blogs, podcasts, and case studies.

Why InfoQ? InfoQ’s audience of senior software influencers and technical decision-makers provided the perfect distribution channel for O’Reilly content.

• Targeted Reach: InfoQ campaigns allowed DoiT to connect with the ‘right’ audience.

• Lead Quality: InfoQ consistently delivered prospects interested in technical content, aligning with DoiT’s ideal customer profile.

• Brand Awareness & Conversion: While initially viewed as a brand awareness channel, InfoQ has proven to be a valuable lead generation source for DoiT, delivering a steady flow of high-quality leads.

Best Practices & Key Takeaways

• Leverage Recognized Content: Using well-known technical resources like O’Reilly books increases engagement and lead capture rates.

• Align Content with Audience Needs: InfoQ’s audience highly values technical depth, making O’Reilly content an ideal asset.

• Monitor Performance & Refresh Content: DoiT typically sponsors O’Reilly books for 4-8 months, ensuring content remains fresh and relevant.

• Combine Content with Targeted Distribution: High-quality content paired with the right platform maximizes ROI.

Conclusion By leveraging O’Reilly’s trusted technical content within InfoQ’s high-value audience, DoiT successfully enhanced its demand generation strategy. The partnership not only strengthened brand awareness but also delivered a consistent pipeline of qualified leads, making InfoQ a key component of DoiT’s marketing success.

For organizations seeking to engage senior technical audiences, sponsoring O’Reilly content and utilizing InfoQ’s targeted distribution channels offers a proven path to impactful demand generation.

“We’ve found that InfoQ’s audience of senior software influencers and technical decision makers respond well to technical content. This audience already recognizes the O’Reilly brand, and are willing to fill out a form to get a high-quality resource. This is a great way for us to introduce the DoiT brand to new prospects.”

-Jennifer Janes - Senior Demand Generation Marketing Manager

Supercharge Your Demand Generation with O’Reilly Content on InfoQ

Looking to connect with senior software engineers, architects, and decision-makers? Discover how O’Reilly’s expert content creation and InfoQ’s highly engaged technical audience can help you drive brand awareness and maximize demand generation.

Let’s talk! Connect with Sharon Cordesse (scordesse@oreilly.com) and Bethany Vananda (Bethany.Vananda@c4media.com) to explore how this partnership can elevate your marketing strategy. Schedule a time to chat today!

In this interview, InfoQ Editor Srini Penchikala offers an insider's view of AI's horizon in 2025. He sees Small Language Models democratizing AI, making powerful technologies more accessible and privacy-friendly and believes that AI Agents will emerge as game-changers, potentially automating complex workflows with unprecedented intelligence. Penchikala also envisions specialized databases and domain-specific solutions transforming how businesses leverage AI, and urges marketers to showcase practical, impactful applications that solve real-world challenges.

Hi Srini, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at InfoQ?

I serve as the Lead Editor for the AI Infrastructure Community on InfoQ. I have the honor and privilege of working with great folks in the AI space who are subject matter experts and practitioners in their field. With so much happening in AI/ML area, especially in Generative AI (GenAI) space, for the last few years, it's a great time to be part of this evolution as we see AI technologies become more and more integrated with every day activities whether it's in the business, at work or at home. I learn something new everyday from the excellent team at InfoQ.

With the advent of ChatGPT, we’ve been hearing a lot about Large Language Models (LLMs). What are Small Language Models and why are they important?

The AI space which was accelerated in terms of growth and adoption when GPT and ChatGPT were released back in 2022, GenAI and LLMs have pretty much taken over the AI landscape.

Large Language Models (LM) are the foundation of AI applications and play a critical role in developing the solution. LLMs at a high level, are language models with many parameters, and are pre-trained on a large amount of data. They typically contain billions of parameters and are capable of understanding and generating content (text, image or audio) based on input prompt statements. These models are very expensive to create, but they are very powerful in the capabilities they offer to solve AI/ML problems in the business domains.

We are witnessing LLMs being dominantly used in various business and technology use cases to create exciting new opportunities that we have never even thought about before. Not only for the end users but also for software engineers, the DevOps engineers and other groups to be more productive. LLMs have empowered pretty much the full life cycle of the process.

LLMs are powerful but they require significant computing resources to operate and you cannot just run it on a small machine or a small cluster of machines. There's also the privacy and data security factors where you may not be able to send the data to the cloud to leverage these LLMs.

This is where Small Language Models or SLMs can help. They offer many of the same benefits as LLMs, but they're smaller in size, they're trained using smaller data sets and they don't require a lot of computing resources. These models are obviously not for every use case out there. They are valuable for use cases where you have a constraint on the resources or you want to localize the model execution.

Another important technology to mention in the context of LLMs is the Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG. With RAG you can train the base model with your company's private information and then, you can use the new self-hosted model to ask questions and prompts that are specific to your business domain. We'll be seeing a lot more applications using RAG in 2025. Already a majority of production scale AI applications are using RAG.

AI agents have come a long way over the last 3-5 years. How do you feel they have matured and what’s their potential for automating software development processes?

There are a lot of different and diverse definitions of AI agents. With all the power of LLMs, the AI process execution can be vastly enhanced by a program that "acts" on the output of an LLM. These programs are called AI agents which can call, as part of a multi-step workflow, a certain task in order to implement a step in the workflow (https://huggingface.co/blog/smolagents).

Agent based applications can automate the end-to-end AI pipelines with multiple agents working together to accomplish the goals of the overall process. Another advantage of muti-agent based workflow applications is that each agent can talk to the agents in a feedback loop that enriches the agents to iteratively perform the steps better and better in every round and more importantly minimize the hallucinations.

Companies like OpenAI are going to have AI Agents as a big part of their strategy this year.

“The concept of AI agents is a big leap from current capabilities that require step-by-step prompting and a significant step towards superintelligence or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which is human-level or beyond human-level intelligence.” (Source)

I personally think 2025 will be the year of AI Agents as they can take the LLM applications to the next level by automatically taking actions based on the LLM output, instead of human users manually providing the input prompts in each and every step of the process.

With distributed databases underpinning many AI solutions, how do you see database vendors evolving their offerings to support AI-driven use cases?

Databases and Data Engineering processes are still important components of AI solutions. All AI applications require some type of data storage and data processing, so the database space has also been going through major transformation and innovations during the explosion of AI adoption in diverse applications.

Gen AI solutions have led to the growth and adoption of purpose driven data stores like Vector Databases. A vector database deals with types of data called Vectors which are the output of machine learning models and the way Generative AI models represent any type of data. These databases are highly specialized to work with vectors with specialized queries that search and find content by relevance, by similarity, by alignment in the numerical representation of vector embeddings.

A typical LLM based RAG application pipeline includes steps like Tokenization, Embedded Model, Language Model, Data Chunking, Orchestration, Retrieval, and Generation. So, there is a lot of areas that databases supporting LLM applications can innovate and improve in the next couple of years.

Also, speaking of RAG applications the data thats stored and processed in the real world is not always textual data, it can be audio, images, and video type of content that will require multi-model RAG solutions to solve the business problems. This is where the database vendors can focus on helping the developer community to efficiently store and process different types of data.

In addition to specialized databases like Vector databases, other data stores such as graph databases are seeing some renewed interest in AI solutions using RAG techniques. Since Graph NoSQL databases store the data in a graph format, these databases are a perfect complement to support LLM applications. We are going to see more and more Graph RAG based applications, to evolve from isolated nodes in a graph database to graph of knowledge (GoK) and finally Knowledge Graph RAG based applications.

I consider last year 2024 as the year of RAG in terms of AI adoption. In 2025, I envision the data storage solutions will see a significant growth in supporting the real world business application data to keep up with the ever growing "Omni-model RAG" solutions.

How can marketers effectively communicate the benefits of AI-driven tools to non-technical decision-makers, ensuring they understand both the potential and the practical applications?

Even with all the hype out there, AI technologies do offer significant advantages and productivity benefits in a plethora of applications and use cases. AI solutions can help solve many business and technical use cases. This is what marketers can focus on when communicating with non-technical decision makers and customers, highlighting the business problems and opportunities the AI applications can solve without getting into technical details.

With growing concerns about data privacy and responsible AI, what steps should vendors take to build trust with their audience, and how can marketers highlight these efforts effectively?

AI hallucinations, where AI models output inaccurate, non-relevant or misleading results, are a big concern when using AI applications. This can be minimized with practices like using high-quality training data, specifically defining the context on how the AI models will be used, and continuous testing and training of the model.

But a more comprehensive and strategic approach is to use AI Agents to address the AI hallucinations. Multi-agent workflows can be used to iteratively and incrementally improve the accuracy of the models and reduce the biases.

Also, AI governance is more important than ever to ensure the quality and fairness of AI solutions.

And, finally Explainable AI with its core principles of transparency, interpretability, causality, and fairness, can help the users trust the results and output created by AI applications.

Marketers and advocates can highlight to their audience these techniques to ensure that, if properly trained, executed, and governed, AI programs can be very powerful and accountable.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities for AI/ML software vendors in 2025?

In 2025, AI/ML software vendors will need to align their strategies and products with the development and adoption trends of AI technologies. Some of these focus areas are listed below:

• More Business Domain Specific AI solutions (e.g. we may start to see domain specific LLM’s like a foundation model for healthcare industry to start taking shape)

• Full SDLC Lifecycle

• Multi-model RAG solutions

• AI Agents and Agent based workflow solutions

• Edge AI with AI powered devices

• More Self-Hosted LLM models to deploy locally inside the organizations’ data centers or in private cloud w/o having to depend on cloud based commercial solutions.

• AI Infrastructure will see significant changes to accommodate the developments in language models. The infrastructure will also start to embrace sustainable and green computing strategies to bring down the cost of training models.

As AI continues to evolve, how should marketers approach balancing the hype around new technologies with realistic, actionable benefits for their target audience?

The latest developments in AI technologies offer significant benefits to consumers, end users and IT professionals in all domains and sectors. But no doubt there is a lot of hype about AI. Marketers need to communicate what their audience should be excited about without getting distracted and disrupted by all the hype out there.

This can be done by focusing on the true value of AI technologies especially with trends like Generative AI and Languages Models (Large, Small and Micro) can bring to day-to-day applications.

Edge computing is another area where language models, especially small language models will shine. Edge AI programs will be hosted and executed on devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops etc., bringing the power of AI down to the devices at the hands of everyday users.

Marketers should highlight the business and technology use cases where AI technologies outperform the traditional approaches whether it’s healthcare, manufacturing, financial services or any other business domain.

In this interview, Andrew Lombardi, the head geek at Mystic, and Joseph Ottinger, a seasoned programmer, share their experiences and insights on various topics including the integration of generative AI in software development, significant advancements in the enterprise Java ecosystem, and the evolving landscape of IoT systems. They also discuss their new book, "Beginning Spring 6: From Beginner to Pro," strategies for staying ahead of emerging technologies, and advice for B2B marketers aiming to connect with software development leaders. Through their candid conversation, Andrew and Joe provide a comprehensive look at the current state and future trends of the tech industry.

InfoQ: Joe, Andrew, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re up to these days?

Andrew: Andrew here, I’m the head geek in charge at Mystic where we opened our doors in 2000 (fun year for tech). We’ve been in business for 24 years now and have helped companies as big as Walmart or as controversial as Twitter 1.0 succeed in their project goals. After a nearly 5 year engagement with Twitter we’ve stayed in flight helping companies succeed and deploying solutions using a variety of technologies and platforms including: Java (of course), Kotlin, React, Python and Rust. We’ve got some R&D projects with generative AI and doing plain ‘ole boring AI / machine learning for some clients as well.

Joe: And I’m Joe! I’m pretty much a meerkat of little brain or something, churning out content on a fairly regular basis. I’ve been programming for something like - gosh, how old am I? - over forty years now, starting with BASIC on a Timex/Sinclair 1000 and progressing through Pascal, COMAL, COBOL, xBase, the C-likes (C and C++), Cold Fusion, Perl, Python, and on into Java, Scala, and Kotlin, and probably a bunch I have forgotten or want to forget. I’ve focused a lot of energy on transfer of information throughout my career, trying to bend the envelope where I can and make sure others can see farther than I can, which is part of why I’ve tried to write for so long over my career.  

InfoQ: What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges for integrating generative AI into software development, and how do you address the common misconceptions about AI potentially replacing human roles?

Andrew: The most significant opportunity is also the greatest challenge: How to take advantage of generative AI while maintaining quality and ensuring the written code solves the real problems. A lot of talk around AI involves it “taking your jobs” and while that is always the case for an emerging technology those who benefit the most are the ones who can adopt and use it as a multiplier in their role.

Joe: The biggest challenge there is, I think, awareness. Most people think of AI as this giant blob of… something. They don’t really know what it does, they just ask it a question and it responds with something that confirms their biases, for the most part, and thus it’s sort of like the abyss looking back at you - if it says the same thing you might have said, well, surely it can do what you do, thus it’s a competitor, right? 

But that’s not the way it actually is - what it’s feeding back to you is what other people might have said themselves, so it’s really regurgitating a sort of ‘inferenced’ common knowledge, but that’s not the same as real knowledge or real innovation. 

Humans are always going to be more flexible; the computer blends better and faster, but we’re better thinkers, and likely always will be. There is our opportunity: when it comes to AI, we can know better than the AI can about what the limits are, and how to focus and exploit them. AI is a better mousetrap for some kinds of problems, is all. It’s horribly useful, especially for those problems, and gosh, I rely on it! But without me knowing how to focus it, it’s not going to be able to replace me. [That’s what the AI told me to write, at least. Was it good?]

InfoQ: The enterprise Java development ecosystem has experienced notable changes and advancements in recent years.  What would you say are some of the biggest developments and trends?

Joe: I think the biggest shifts have come from the JDK team itself. Coding on the JVM hadn’t changed all that much in years - people managed to shoehorn reactive and functional programming on the JVM with quite a bit of success, really, considering how little the JVM catered to those paradigms, but once Java 11 came out and we started seeing actual technical innovation in the JVM again, you saw real support for functional programming come into play, and with Java 21 and Loom, you see reactive programming really starting to come into its own without having to require such specialized code, for the most part. The JDK team isn’t stopping there: the native method invocation process is mutating, we’re likely to see native primitive types at last… just a lot of little things that we really wished Java to have for a decade or more are really starting to come into play.

How will that affect the library ecosystem? It’s hard to say. Right now, it’s mostly incidental improvement, because the ecosystem as a whole still has to support the older JVMs, but as that requirement lessens and people learn more about what the new JVM features are doing for them, we’ll see more mutations and better from the ecosystem as a whole. Or so I think!

InfoQ: Earlier this year, you and Andrew published a new book, “Beginning Spring 6: From Beginner to Pro” (By Apress).  How are developers using Spring in 2024? What kinds of applications are they building?

Joe: I don’t think it’s really changed: people are still building complex variants of the PetStore, over and over and over again. The requirements are different - we’re now seeing security moved around and done in a lot of varying ways, you see a lot of messaging and data warehousing take place where people want to preserve application state so they can replay it at will, and so forth - but from ten thousand feet, it’s largely the same, with some of the library names being changed from place to place.

It’s a lot stronger now than it was - the days of having to roll up Struts actions are long gone, and you really don’t do WebMVC the way you used to either, unless you have fairly archaic requirements - people expect rich front ends now, and some of the performance enhancements you have at your disposal are different than they used to be. And deployment has exploded. Thankfully, there’s a huge body of knowledge out there to help - it’s not all the way there, yet, but that’s the way growth is; people start working with the raw materials and refine until there’s a standard practice.

InfoQ: Joe, you've recently been involved in designing and deploying services for Internet of Things (IoT) integration across various platforms. Could you share some details about your work in this field? Additionally, how are edge computing and AI influencing the development and deployment of IoT systems?

Joe: It’s changing the deployment model. IoT has really brought languages that have VMs to the forefront; we’re not really doing ladder programming or machine-level coding as much as we used to, especially for rapid development. You certainly can - I’d never sneer at someone using Rust for deployment on an IoT platform, for example, although I’d marvel at their investment in compilation times - but what I have seen in IoT is a focus on languages like Node, Python, and the JVM (even the JVM, which has much better performance on small devices than it did!) because they enable reliable cross-platform much better than they used to.

Of course, what we’re not seeing very much is a focus on security - everyone in IoT I know is aware of it, and is aware of the looming disaster that IoT security represents, but it’s a problem we’ve not really solved well yet. There are rumblings, and there have been for years; who knows, maybe Matter can help us solve it once and for all? But I still have my doubts.

As far as AI: AI on IoT is still an external service. None of the devices I’ve deployed on, even the “bigger devices,” have the horses to actually do any of the really fun AI models. They can do some of the inferencing and other simpler math-based models, but that’s not really what people think of these days when they think of AI: They think of conversational models, and those are expensive on those tiny boxes. Running a simple “Hi, how are you today” query… well… if I issued it on one of my better edge devices when I first picked up this interview, let’s just say that it would almost be ready to respond with its first word.

InfoQ: Andrew, as a company that has embraced remote work for 24 years, how have you adapted to the recent industry-wide acceptance and challenges of remote work since 2020? What strategies have you implemented to maintain team cohesion and productivity across multiple time zones?

Andrew: The changes we’ve seen in the industry since 2020 is an acceptance (and for some more recently a backlash) of knowledge workers being able to ditch the commute and work from wherever they felt comfortable. An investment in connectivity and ample hardware and desk setups in the home during the pandemic has paved the way for converts to the work from home lifestyle. The changes involve nurturing a team that spans multiple time zones and occasionally having conference calls at 4 a.m. The online tools are all available and have evolved enough to ensure your team's success.

InfoQ: As the industry evolves, what strategies do you employ to ensure you and your team stays ahead of the curve in terms of adopting emerging technologies and methodologies, and how can B2B marketers align their offerings with these evolving needs?

Andrew: Our team is always focused on helping our clients succeed in the most efficient and sustainable way possible. To that end, we encourage our team to contribute to open source projects and have hobbies which for engineers usually involves learning a random programming language “for fun”. The folks on our team have been in the industry usually for a decade or more, so emerging technologies and methodologies are taken with a grain of salt and evaluated for how it can help our clients. Marketers can align their offerings by providing a wealth of instructional material and guides which make adoption if it is appropriate for our client super simple.

InfoQ: When researching new technologies, what sites/publications do you typically visit?

Andrew: These days it ends up being found through searches with DuckDuckGo, or Perplexity and interrogating the other various large language models out there for the source material links back to Reddit or StackOverflow.

Joe: For me, I talk to anyone and everyone as if I’m a total neophyte. No judgment. If someone tells me about the new hotness, I don’t care if it’s a technology I’m familiar with or not, or even if it’s a deployment environment I use; if you mention, say, “Primate JS” and describe what it is and what it does, I want to be a constant learner, because you never know what really cool idea or tech is lurking behind someone’s raw passion. You never know how your perspective will change when someone else’s input is respected.

InfoQ: What advice would you give to B2B marketers looking to reach software development leaders?

Andrew: Tutorials on their products, show it in action, and write the examples in the most appropriate languages. If your product is hidden behind a sales lead generation form with no way to kick the tires or read more, you’ve already lost.

Joe: Holy cow, yes! Approach the product from a stance of ignorance. If someone who knows nothing about your product or service can’t figure it out in two minutes or less, you’ve lost them - even if they have to use your service, they’re never going to really buy in. Show, don’t tell. Fill in all the gaps. Assume they know little about how you think about problems.

InfoQ recently sat down with seasoned cloud architect, Renato Losio, to get his thoughts on the current trends and challenges in cloud computing. In this interview, Renato explores the evolving domain of cloud architecture, highlighting the increasing prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential for specialized services offered by providers beyond the major players. In addition to providing valuable reflections on the cloud technology landscape, he also provides guidance on how B2B marketers can optimize their offerings to better meet the needs of cloud professionals.

InfoQ:  Hi Renato, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're up to these days?

Renato: I currently live between two cities in Italy and Germany - Trieste and Berlin - where I work remotely as a cloud architect focusing on storage services and relational databases, mostly on AWS. As an InfoQ editor, I love to cover cloud-related topics and anything that is open-source technology. I recently accepted to be the chair for the very first InfoQ Dev Summit in Munich, so I am looking forward to planning the tracks and speakers for what I hope will be a great conference.

InfoQ: How do you stay up-to-date on the latest trends and how do you determine which technologies are worth covering on InfoQ?

Renato: I'm a lazy software engineer, so I will never be able to keep myself up to date just by willpower. Writing for InfoQ forces me to stay ahead of the curve. My goal - both as an InfoQ reader and editor - is to filter out the noise and plethora of product announcements. Even if you consider just the three biggest cloud providers - Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud -  we’re talking about a hundred announcements every week.

A cloud architect cannot easily parse such a large volume of news. As a reader, InfoQ helps me figure out what's important. As an editor, I try to look for the “hidden gems” beyond the big announcements, things that might have an immediate impact on the job of a software engineer. I like to focus on the small incremental changes that may not have that “wow effect,” but can immediately make life easier for practitioners.

InfoQ: The concept of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments appears to be getting traction. What are some of the major cloud trends that marketers should be paying attention to in 2024?

Renato: The primary reference should be the annual InfoQ DevOps and Cloud Report. I believe the evolution of cloud technology has shifted from being revolutionary to a more evolutionary trajectory. There seems to be a consensus in this regard. While numerous announcements and developments are occurring, such as those seen at re:Invent, there's a lack of breakthroughs, with one notable exception: artificial intelligence (AI).

Additionally, there has been a noticeable focus on sustainability and green computing, particularly evident in conference announcements. I believe the majority of the community still views sustainability primarily as a proxy for cost optimization. Thus, they have not fully embraced the concept of sustainability in cloud computing but rather see it mainly as another way to save dollars in the deployment. While there is often a correlation between sustainability and cost savings, it's not always the case. I hope there will be a shift in perception among practitioners.

Another trend is the concept of frugal architectures, as highlighted by the CTO of Amazon at the latest re:Invent conference. The idea revolves around cloud-native architectures that aim to deliver cost-aware, sustainable, and maintainable solutions.

Finally, a topic that has garnered significant attention on InfoQ is "Cloud Computing in the Post-Serverless Era." Bilgin Ibryam suggests a shift from relying solely on the major hyperscalers towards a proliferation of specialized vertical providers. These providers may offer specific services such as partitioned databases or managed CI/CD, fostering a more vertical approach to cloud services across multiple platforms. Users may ultimately opt to utilize third-party services to access these offerings rather than directly engaging with the providers themselves.

InfoQ: What motivates cloud developers and architects and how can marketers better engage with them?

Renato: One of the most challenging aspects revolves around complexity. When attending industry events or conferences, there's often a tendency to become highly enthused and applaud major announcements, inspirational ideas, and the like. However, there are also challenges to contend with. Attending such events often marks the introduction of new challenges. It's like a technical milestone for me. While I may applaud new features or services, that is the moment where I realize that what I previously thought was a well-architected deployment may no longer suffice in light of these announcements. It is the day the goalposts shift, presenting me with fresh hurdles to overcome.

The initial euphoria transforms into new challenges that consistently keep cloud architects engaged. In a way, it feels akin to buying into a trend. I've observed certain architectures, deployments, and services that were undoubtedly cutting-edge five years ago, which were considered cool at the time, but have since become commonplace. The constantly shifting standards keep pushing us forward.

InfoQ: Migrating to the cloud, cloud cost reduction, and moving to a hybrid cloud were cited as the biggest ‘cloud-related’ technical challenges for InfoQ readers, based on the results of an Oct 2022 reader survey.  Do these continue to be major challenges in 2024? What do you currently see as the biggest obstacles to organizations realizing the full potential of cloud technology?

Renato: These are all still big challenges today. Initially, there was widespread acceptance of the idea that the cloud is elastic, allowing users to pay only for what they use, which was indeed advantageous and remains true today. However, the deployments are now more complex, necessitating an iterative approach to cost optimization. Furthermore, utilizing multiple clouds can be both beneficial and problematic.

On one hand, the hybrid cloud offers integration opportunities with data from various sources, including on-premises environments. On the other hand, it poses challenges, particularly considering the rapid expansion of services and options provided by the major providers. Fifteen years ago, AWS offered less than 10 services, which surged to almost 200 options five years ago, and now I have lost count.

Each cloud provider has thousands of different components to consider in their pricing structure. While not all components apply to every deployment scenario, any cloud architect claiming significant cost savings without conducting a thorough data analysis is either overly optimistic or attempting to sell a product or service.

InfoQ: According to a January 2024 report from Hava.io, “Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintains the highest market share at 32%, followed by Microsoft Azure (23%) and Google Cloud (10%).”  Do you anticipate any major shifts in cloud market share - amongst ‘the big three’ - in the coming years? What might be driving these shifts?

Renato: I have some reservations regarding trusting percentages in general, as they can vary depending on how the numbers are derived. However, many companies are increasingly adopting diverse cloud deployments for various reasons, such as through mergers and acquisitions or due to specialized teams working with specific technologies. From my experience, most companies that utilize multiple cloud providers still have a dominant one in their deployment. I anticipate minimal changes within the big three cloud providers, but for the first time, AWS is not the disrupter and has to catch Microsoft and Google in generative AI.

I'm curious to observe how other providers are gaining traction. For example, Cloudflare has evolved from a CDN provider to a full-fledged cloud provider, competing directly with serverless technology and object storage alternatives. Whether it's through increasing their market share or offering novel alternatives in unique ways, I anticipate a broader range of options emerging within the cloud computing landscape.

InfoQ: As an InfoQ editor, you bring extensive experience as a cloud architect, tech lead, and cloud services specialist.  How does your professional work inform your InfoQ writing? How has writing for InfoQ helped you in your career?

Renato: The greatest advantage of InfoQ is the opportunity to interact with remarkable individuals I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Whether it's through writing news articles, attending QCon events, or serving as a conference chair, I've had the chance to engage with incredible people.

Before my involvement with InfoQ, I was somewhat entrenched in a narrower perspective. Having predominantly focused on AWS for nearly a decade, I was confined to a bubble. This isn't to say that AWS is inadequate; it's an exceptional and captivating platform. However, I had limited exposure to alternative approaches and deployments. InfoQ has provided me with the opportunity to broaden my horizons and explore different methodologies and deployments, affording me a more well-rounded understanding of the landscape.

InfoQ: Looking ahead, Renato, what do you envision as the next frontier in cloud architecture and services?

Renato: In the upcoming years, the predominant focus will continue to be on integrating AI into every facet of cloud services. Additionally, a trend I've noticed is the concerted effort to streamline complexity. Over time, the cloud has evolved from offering just a few services to now boasting hundreds of distinct offerings. Consequently, developers have to determine which services to utilize, how to connect various components, and how to integrate different pieces effectively.

For many years, discussions at conferences have revolved around finding ways to manage this escalating complexity and I anticipate that AI will play a pivotal role in addressing this challenge. At least, that's my hope for the future.

InfoQ: What advice do you have for B2B marketers looking to reach cloud architects in 2024 with new services and offerings?

Renato: As a cloud architect, there are two primary concerns I always consider when approaching new services or features. Firstly, I evaluate the ease of integration into my existing deployment. This doesn't just pertain to the technological aspect but extends to logistical considerations as well. For instance, can I seamlessly incorporate your technology using a marketplace from a major cloud vendor, or would I need to establish a new contract with another provider?

Most cloud architects have significant control over their deployments and AWS costs. For example, a cloud architect might be able to decide for thousands of euros on AWS billing, even for third-party providers, without encountering obstacles. However, acquiring licenses or subscriptions often involves a different procurement process. Thus, the ease of integration is crucial.

The second concern revolves around the reluctance to adopt multi-cloud or external services. It's not because these services aren't superior; in fact, I'm aware of many that outperform alternatives. For instance, MongoDB Atlas may be a superior technology compared to AWS DocumentDB, which is sometimes viewed as a subpar managed option. However, if the NoSQL database is not the crucial component of the deployment, simplicity and GDPR requirements make it more convenient to consolidate everything within a single provider.

Convincing me to overcome this barrier requires demonstrating that the added effort is worthwhile. In Europe, especially for large companies, these considerations are important. When someone claims there's no overhead, I'm usually skeptical and interpret it as an attempt to make a sale rather than an accurate assessment of the situation.

InfoQ recently caught up with Daniel Bryant, a well-known DevRel Leader, Java Champion, and - for the past decade - a Cloud & DevOps Editor for InfoQ.com. Daniel is also InfoQ’s News Manager, where he helps to drive the site’s comprehensive coverage of key innovations and trends that professional software engineers need to know about. 

Hi Daniel, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, some of the different hats that you wear, and your professional journey thus far?

Hello, I’ve held various roles in my career, from academic to coder, from software architect to platform engineer, and from CTO to product marketer. I jokingly say I approach job titles with a Pokémon mindset: “gotta catch ‘em all!”

Looking back, however, I can see that there are three key themes that knit together my career choices: (1) I revel in constantly learning new things and exploring new problem spaces, (2) I enjoy helping people learn about and understand technology, and (3), I thrive as a generalist rather than a specialist. 

In a nutshell, I like to “connect the dots” across a range of problems, people, and technology. Currently, I’m doing this as a product marketing and developer relations advisor to several startup organizations within the dev tooling and B2B developer platform SaaS spaces.

You’ve written for and spoken for a wide range of community sites, publications, and conferences. From what you’ve seen, what makes the InfoQ and QCon editorial model unique?

The most noticeable differences with InfoQ (and QCon) in comparison with other sites are the “by practitioners for practitioners” approach and a lean towards senior engineers and technical leaders. I’m obviously biased, but I think we strike the perfect combination of these two things.

Of course, as with any approach, this comes with strengths and weaknesses (otherwise known as “opportunities”!). 

The strengths include our ability to spot trends emerging from people actually doing the work, e.g. we covered NoSQL, platform engineering, and the ML transformer architecture before many others did, and we were able to connect the dots on how these trends may impact the day-to-day lives of software engineers and architects. 

The weaknesses, or opportunities, include not being able to cover every topic or event we would like. This is probably true for most news and education-focused organisations like InfoQ, but it’s especially noticeable for us as we don’t have any journalists or staff writers on the team. However, I’ll take this opportunity to say that we are constantly growing our team of contributors!

The InfoQ Trends reports seem to encapsulate InfoQ’s editorial mission to some degree. What are the Trends Reports and how do they aim to serve InfoQ’s readership?

The InfoQ Trends Reports are designed to help readers identify and track interesting technologies and trends over time. We act as “information Robin Hoods” and constantly scout new technologies. We also provide guidance on where we believe these technologies are heading and the required context for the successful adoption of techniques. This often translates into a recommendation (or not) for readers to incorporate these technologies and techniques into their current development plans and product roadmaps.

We aim to create a trend report for each core topic once a year (e.g. software architecture, Java, cloud, DevOps, AI/ML, etc), and we use Geoffrey Moore’s classic “crossing the chasm” model to track the “diffusion of innovation”. Things generally move from “innovator” and “early adopters”, and sometimes they cross the chasm to the “early and late majorities”. Depending on the risk profile of a reader’s organization, they can choose to adopt technologies from the lifecycle accordingly.

The InfoQ trends reports are typically our best-performing and most talked-about content, and they also are only opinion-type pieces we create and share publicly. 

What makes InfoQ’s approach to ‘news’ different from other publications?  What does the ‘news process’ look like on InfoQ and how does the team decide ‘what is important’?

As mentioned above, all of the content on InfoQ is created by practitioners, and this is our (not so) secret sauce!

Any contributor at InfoQ can submit story ideas and news leads via our issue tracking system, and topic leaders either approve or reject this. Anyone within our contributor community can also add comments to an issue. This way, there is a nice balance between leadership and the team selecting what stories are written up for the site.

Once a lead is available in our issue track, a contributor typically explores the respective technologies, learns more about the techniques, or reaches out to other experts in order to provide additional value over any coverage already available on breaking news sites. We aim to provide the “best, not (necessarily) first” coverage.

How can a B2B marketer get the attention of a highly time-constrained - and often suspicious of poor marketing - audience?  What can marketers learn from the InfoQ approach to writing News? Are there any tips and tricks you can share that might help with writing marketing copy or product positioning?  

I frequently recommend that marketers should be super clear on the goals they are looking to achieve. As part of this, they must understand their intended user persona (within their ideal customer profile) and define the metrics of success. Honestly, if they do these simple steps, they’ll probably be within the top 10% of marketing teams!

Once you have your goals, metrics, and personas clearly specified, the best thing you can do is to create content that authentically addresses the challenges identified.

For example, I really like what the NGINX marketing team did with their “Microservices March” campaign. They appeared to be genuinely excited to educate folks about the benefits and challenges of adopting microservices. The content was created by practitioners, who invested in building a community without being overly aggressive in marketing to the people who joined.

With over 310K subscribers, the InfoQ Software Architects’ newsletter provides a unique platform to reach both current and aspiring software architects.  How would you describe the editorial vision behind the newsletter?  What are some of the key topics and themes that are typically covered?

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed bootstrapping this project, and it’s amazing to see that this many readers have subscribed over the 75+ editions of this monthly newsletter. 

The editorial vision is focused on providing deep coverage of a topic through the lens of a software architect. Each month we scour InfoQ and the Internet for the best content on the chosen topic, summarise this, and collate it into one easily digestible newsletter.

We’ve covered topics as diverse as frontend architectures, programming languages for the enterprise, cloud computing, leading teams, data engineering, and more, but all through the lens of senior software leaders.

We also regularly listen to feedback from readers, and this has helped shape both the topics covered and the blend of news and case studies covered in the newsletter each month.

At QCon San Francisco 2023, you assembled and led the “Platform Engineering Done Well” track.   What goes into assembling a QCon track? What are some of the key challenges - and decision points - that a track host needs to make?

Assembling a track for QCon is always a lot of fun but also always a lot of work! The key decisions include the positioning and goals of the track. For example, my track was focused on platform engineering, but we wanted to cover the human/people aspects of this in addition to the technology.

Once I have the topics in mind, I then go looking for speakers. And I am always keen to make sure we have a track with speakers that have diverse representation, backgrounds, and thinking.

For anyone interested in a deeper dive into how I approach building tracks, I wrote more about this specific conference in a recent blog post. 

Platform engineering has become a bit of an ‘umbrella’ term for some marketers, being used interchangeably with DevOps.  What is platform engineering from your perspective, why is it important, and how does it relate to DevOps?

There’s a great meme about how DevOps is dead and all we need to do is build platforms using DevOps practices and tools. This is spot on!

I like to think of platform engineering as a subset of DevOps, focused on establishing practices, systems, and tools to enable software developers to code, ship, and run their applications successfully.

I’ve quite enjoyed watching the concept of platform engineering emerge, as it has given the industry a chance to reflect on important qualities of the platforms and tools we build to deliver software. I very much like the focus on self-service, product mindset, and systems thinking – and a lot of this is what the Team Topologies authors espoused for quite some time.

There’s the ‘people’ side to Platform Engineering and then there’s the ‘tools/tech’ side. How should B2B marketers think about introducing - and talking about - their platform engineering offerings to the software development community?

My advice is to focus on the goals and “jobs to be done” of their target users. If you understand the biggest pain point that your potential customers have and can map this to how your product genuinely will help them fix this, the sale should almost be automatic.

The next piece of advice is to always be authentic. Educational content should be created by practitioners, and all assets and copy should be produced as a collaborative effort between marketing and practitioners (engineers, DevRel, CS, SEs, etc). There’s a trope that developers hate marketing, but in my experience, it’s really that developers hate bad marketing.

Compared to other conferences that you’ve spoken at and attended, how is QCon’s audience different?  How are the speakers different?

The biggest difference with QCon’s speakers and audience is the diversity of backgrounds and the levels of seniority. And all of the speakers are practitioners.

As QCon is a multi-track conference focusing on topics from architecture to coding to culture and methods, you will meet people from all (software development) walks of life. The majority of people attending a QCon are either senior practitioners or aspire to be in a senior role, and therefore the quality of conversations is super high.

You currently advise a number of startups on how to build highly effective DevRel teams. You were also previously Head of Developer Relations at Ambassador Labs for six years. How is the role of Developer Evangelist changing and evolving?  How should companies think about DevRel in relation to other, more traditional ‘marketing functions’?

I’ve shared some initial thoughts on the evolution of DevRel early this year on my Avocado Bytes Substack. 

One of the biggest changes we’re encountering now results from the end of the “zero interest rate policy (ZIRP)”. When funding was cheap, and VCs and private equity firms were deploying a lot of cash in search of higher returns, the focus for many companies was on growth at all costs. Over the last 18 months, we’ve very much fallen back into “measured growth” as a goal.

DevRel teams are typically well positioned to create the content “fuel” for the marketing team “engine”, and with the measured growth approach in mind, my advice is to approach content creation with an experimental mindset. Most of us are now doing “more with less”, and so we must be sure of the value each campaign provides. Create a hypothesis with well-defined metrics of success, test this, and either lean into or away from a campaign, depending on the results.

As a B2B marketing executive planning for next year, what are some of the key technology trends - and pain points faced by software engineers - that I should be paying attention to? 

Most of us are still being impacted by the end of the ZIRP environment, and so focusing on trends that act more like “painkillers” as opposed to “vitamins” is my recommendation. 

Security and observability-related trends tend to be less susceptible to budget cuts, as everyone needs to address the pain of being both secure and having the capability to understand what is happening in production.

That’s not to say there isn’t a budget for some of the more developer experience-related “vitamins” (which have a lot of overlap with platform engineering), but this will be harder to tap into.

With AI poised to disrupt everything under the sun, how do you see the media landscape evolving?  How do you see AI impacting the roles of marketers, evangelists, and product management/marketing?

It really is early days here, and I assume a lot will change in the coming years. 

The good news is that a lot of the mundane jobs and “boilerplate” work should be automated away with new and improved AI-infused tooling. The bad news is that it’s going to be ridiculously easy to create content. 

The folks that will succeed here are those who can create content and campaigns that stand out against the increasing background noise of AI-generated content.

In this interview, Rosalind Lutsky walks us through her professional journey as a B2B marketer - sharing examples of successful campaigns, marketing strategies, and key lessons learned - working at several, well-known SaaS companies.   She describes some of the many challenges associated with growth marketing and how to tackle these through experimentation, working with the product team, and mentorship.  Rosalind also identifies three key marketing trends that she believes will change the game: AI and its impact on SEO, attribution, and how companies define ‘growth.’

Hi Rosalind, can you tell us a little bit about your journey as a B2B marketing professional. 

Absolutely! I actually got my start in marketing as a Copywriter at CircleCI. I knew I wanted to transition into SaaS, and I felt as if leaning into my strengths in writing/editing would give me the best introduction. And it certainly did in a lot of ways! Right off the bat, I was working on projects that spanned across different marketing disciplines – landing page and in-app copy for product marketing, technical blog content & culture pieces, incident response, email, webinars, ad copy, the list goes on. That role in particular really helped me learn the language of dev tooling which has carried through in every role I’ve taken on since.

After about a year working as a copywriter, I found myself spending a lot of my time working on lifecycle marketing (email nurtures, collaborative projects with customer support) and product-led growth, which was pretty new to CircleCI at the time. I loved that this new area of marketing let me flex skills in math, logic, and data analytics. Trying to figure out the behavioral signals that indicate growth and then turning that behavior into a conversation with a user was a really interesting challenge.

In my next role after CircleCI, I joined the team at Teleport. That was a fantastic opportunity for me to dive deeper into the demand gen side of marketing: setting up ad campaigns, experimenting with new channels, optimizing spend. I was lucky to have the guidance of an amazing marketing leader, Anadelia Fadeev, who was a mentor and partner in regrowing marketing at Teleport from the ground up. A major highlight in my career was being part of growing a full marketing team. We grew from a team of 2 (across all of marketing) to an immediate team of 5, eventually adding even more folks to demand gen and many others to the other wings of the marketing team. The massive leaps and bounds we were able to make on ads, email, website, and beyond was incredibly exciting and fun to be part of.

Joining Sym back in February, I was faced with even more greenfield than I’d experienced at Teleport. The whole go-to-market team consisted of just me (no other full time sales or marketing folks!) which led me to dive right into everything marketing – quickly growing from Head of Growth into the Head of Marketing there. The technical team at Sym has some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with, and it’s been an incredible learning experience growing a marketing engine from scratch.

What are some of the key lessons that you’ve learned as a Growth Marketing Manager at these companies?

I’d break it down into 3 main lessons:

1. Test test test. One of the hardest realities of working in growth marketing is that you have to try a lot of things - which means you have to be okay having a lot of things fail, too. That requires some serious expectation setting when you’re kicking things off. It also requires persistence, and a willingness to be wrong. You can’t come into a role expecting every strategy you’ve used before to work in a completely new circumstance. You have to be eager to try a lot of things (marketing channels, strategies, messaging, etc.) to find out what sticks.

2. Create a close relationship with the product. Some growth roles actually fall under the product team. The types of growth roles I’ve taken on have been more demand-focused, but even still, being in lockstep with product makes a huge difference. Not only are they a team of people with great domain expertise (I come from a non-technical background, so I always need to rely on folks with this sort of knowledge), but they can help influence the direction of the product. Where I’ve seen the most success is when you’re taking advantage of the learnings from product and putting it into growth strategies and using what you learn from growth to influence the product.

3. Lean on strong mentors, but don’t be afraid to pave your own way. This is general career advice, really, but something I’ve found extremely useful in growth roles in particular. I’ve talked to a lot of folks in various marketing roles and leaned on them for advice: CMOs, growth leaders, demand gen leaders, generalists, specialists, the list goes on. I recognize that my knowledge and experience is limited, and getting an outside perspective whether it’s on a specific problem you’re facing or about your career more broadly has been massive for me so far. That said, everyone is going to have a slightly different opinion. Going back to point #1, you have to be willing to commit to something and try it, even if it might fail.

Can you share any examples of past marketing strategies that have been most effective for you?  

In dev tooling in particular, I find that a lot of marketing looks like finding ways to add value for your prospective users. You can’t just show what your tool does, you have to have a perspective and tap into your team’s knowledge. For instance, at Sym, we saw a massive jump in leads when we introduced an ebook on just-in-time access in AWS. This is a major use case for folks who come to Sym, and yet in the vast landscape that is AWS, it can be hard to find clear direction on how to implement JIT access well. Creating an ebook based on our team’s knowledge and experience (combined with external sources) and offering that up on our website and via ads caused a major jump in the volume of leads we received.

Can you share any recent successful campaigns or initiatives that have significantly impacted your product's growth or market positioning, and what were the key factors behind their success?

The first one that comes to mind is a campaign I worked on at Teleport. We were thinking through the types of companies that would get the most value out of our product (compliance-heavy, complex infra). We came up with a few verticals to run campaigns around, and I owned our fintech campaign. We saw a massive ROI from that campaign in particular. I’d attribute the success of that particular campaign to a few things:

• First, we took a multi-pronged approach, we created a landing page, ran targeted ads, created a nurture campaign, and involved our SDR team. 

• Second, we let it run for a couple of months, giving it enough time to work. 

• Third, we followed through on tracking and attribution – it’s one thing to create a campaign and ship it out into the world, but it’s another to be thoughtful about tracking how it performs.

 It may seem obvious, but tying revenue to marketing activities can be surprisingly difficult in practice. Making a concerted effort to follow through on that helped us learn more from the campaign and refine our strategy for the next one.

How do you identify emerging trends and adapt your marketing strategies to capitalize on them effectively?

This question feels especially poignant with all of the recent developments in AI. I think step #1 in staying up to date is to read: read LinkedIn posts from leaders you like, read newsletters or blogs that are informative (I particularly like MKT1 and Growth Unhinged from Kyle Poyar), and stay up to date on industry news. Going back to experimentation (and leaning on mentors!) I’d say seriously check out strategic recommendations, data, and tool suggestions from other leaders in the space. 

That said, I do think we have a tendency in marketing especially to rebrand foundational marketing concepts. Being aware of what’s truly ‘new’ and what’s the same thing reframed is an important piece of the puzzle. 

Software products often cater to diverse target audiences. How do you segment your marketing efforts to resonate with different customer segments, and what challenges have you encountered in this regard?

This is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult challenges in marketing. Getting your target audience exactly right is tough, and especially so when you have multiple segments/buyers you want to talk to at once. I’ve found the most success with:

1. Talking to your audience (your existing customers, prospects, etc.) to understand how they’re talking about the challenges they're facing and goals they’re working towards and… 

2. Being willing to focus and iterate. You don’t want to go too small with your audience, but being willing to focus your efforts on a specific ICP is extremely helpful. That, and being willing to test new targeting, new messaging, new ad types, etc. until you see traction.

Could you share your approach to measuring the ROI of marketing efforts for software products? What KPIs and metrics do you find most valuable in assessing the success of a campaign?

My favorite way to measure the ROI of marketing is through SQLs (or an equivalent metric). Having a number that reaches beyond ‘marketing qualified’ I think is the key to making sure your marketing tactics are actually successful. Making sure your leads are good quality and paying attention to pipeline is crucial. 

That said, specific KPIs and metrics are so dependent on the company stage. In the early days, I think the focus should be more on building: setting up the engine that will get you to a reliable ‘dollars in dollar out’ marketing motion. I’d say looking at guardrail metrics like website pageviews, inbounds, ad CTRs and CPCs, email opens/replies, etc. is always going to be important, but your quarterly goals will likely differ based on company stage.

In the context of software marketing, what role does content play in establishing thought leadership, and how do you ensure the quality and relevance of your content?

Content is huge, especially now. Being able to provide insight, perspective, and technical guidance is crucial in software marketing. With AI, we’re seeing a flood of (not great) content which certainly complicates things. I think, though, that there will be an even greater appetite for quality content as more repetitive content gets pushed out into the world (that, and quality AI tools that support the creation of good work, like Writer).

I think the relevance of your content depends on your goals. Are you trying to establish a founder at your company as a thought leader? Are you hoping to drive leads? Do you want to share product news? There are a host of goals that underlie the content you produce, and what’s relevant to your audience (and who makes up that audience) is hyper-dependent on those goals. In broad strokes, though, I’d say that making sure your content is technical enough for your audience is key, as is finding strong writers. Those writers can come from your internal team or you can lean on external folks (for instance, I particularly like working with the technical writing team at Wizard on Demand).

What emerging technologies or marketing trends do you believe will have the most significant impact on the software marketing landscape, and how is your company preparing for these changes?

Here are a few emerging technologies/marketing trends that I think will change the game:

1. Unsurprisingly, AI is a big one. Not only is it changing content, but it’s no doubt going to have a massive impact on SEO. I think using AI to enhance your work is going to be key for software marketers.

2. Second, I’d say attribution. Obviously, attribution isn’t new. But, I think there’s going to be an increased emphasis on collecting valuable, clean data throughout the marketing funnel. That, coupled with the push for increased privacy, will make for an interesting mix.

3. Lastly, the concept of growth. For a lot of tech companies, I think this means acknowledging the importance of self-serve and hiring people to support that motion. For other teams (where growth looks more like demand gen), I’d say it means creating much closer alignment between product and marketing teams.

As a company, being willing to embrace change, looking at new tools and ideas with a critical eye, and using new technologies to enhance, rather than replace creativity and ingenuity I think is the key.

InfoQ recently sat down with Brandon Hoe, VP of Marketing at Oxeye, to talk about some of the marketing challenges faced by software startups in the application security space. Having led four early-stage security startups himself, he emphasizes the importance of establishing market positioning, identifying your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and developing the right messaging for your ICP.  He highlights the benefits of working as an integrated revenue team (sales + marketing as one), why he’s eliminated the traditional notion of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) from his approach, and introduces a new industry podcast that he recently launched which showcases the personal stories of leading experts in the cybersecurity world. 

Hi Brandon, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Oxeye?

I’m the VP of Marketing at Oxeye, and every day, I try to find ways to get the word out about how Oxeye eliminates 90%+ of the vulnerabilities that legacy application security tools find and report, so that developers can focus on writing code instead of fixing ‘vulnerabilities’ that don’t really exist. The claim seems incredulous until we have the opportunity to educate our potential customers about how we approach the problem. Taking this tack helps us to overcome the skepticism people have about the claims, while keeping the relationship mutually collaborative and respectful.

You’ve led marketing at four early-stage security startups.  What has that experience been like?  What are some of the biggest challenges of early-stage, startup marketing?

The early stages of a company’s life are its most important - it’s purely a matter of survival at that point, and that presents a very unique and dire challenge. The vast majority of early-stage companies have founders and leaders who don’t fully understand what marketing truly entails. 

The natural inclination for most founders/leaders at this stage is to focus on the more visible marketing tactics - events and social media are generally the ones they gravitate to the most. But this typically happens before they’ve developed the foundations for effective marketing - going through the exercise of positioning themselves in the market, defining their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and developing messaging that resonates with their ICP. These are foundational activities that help increase the likelihood of success of any future marketing effort. 

Another common misconception about marketing is that it’s like a spigot that automatically results in all the business a company can handle once it’s turned on. Marketing is a long-term activity, and its effectiveness builds over time. Since most early-stage startups have small budgets and large expectations for rapid growth, this can result in conflict or an erosion of trust between marketing and the primary stakeholders of the company. 

Security has generally been an ‘after-thought’ for many software development organizations.  More recently however, we’ve been hearing more about the idea of ‘shift-left’ security.  Are organizations actually embracing this or is this an idea that’s just being touted by vendors?

The ‘shift left’ movement in application security has been a mantra for a number of years now, and the underlying principle - that the sooner you tackle security in the software development process, the better - is extremely sound. The challenge with shifting left is that to date, the tools that were created with the goal of shifting left and enabling developer-focused security creates a lot of noise, ultimately generating extra work for developers and security teams.

Digital marketing campaigns or exhibiting at events? What’s typically more effective for early-stage companies?

I’ll have to say the common marketing mantra - “test it!”. Without doing so, it’s impossible to say what works best for your particular situation, as the answer is dependent on the industry, your implementation of digital marketing, and other factors. Ideally, your event marketing would be supported by a comprehensive digital marketing program. Isolated marketing tactics aren’t nearly as effective as a comprehensive program where all marketing tactics support each other.

The AppSec space is quite crowded, with hundreds of companies clamoring for developer mindshare.  How do you ensure that your message doesn’t get lost in all the noise?

Yes, it’s an incredibly crowded space, with a number of massive incumbents, and no shortage of new players! 

In our particular situation, it’s a little bit easier to stand out because we can make claims that nobody else has been able to make before. There’s the main claim of reducing vulnerability lists by 90% and up, then the supporting claims that we can do so by focusing on exploitability, which is determined by accessibility of the vulnerability from the Internet (directly or indirectly) and whether a package is used at runtime or not, or is merely an unused artifact. 

While our claims are unique, the challenge of getting the word out there and overcoming decades of inertia and skepticism about claims is something we are continually hacking away at. 

One of the downsides of being an innovator is that you are tasked with the burden of educating the market about what’s possible. Dollars spent on education don’t provide nearly the same ROI as dollars spent on winning business from customers who are already well-informed about a novel approach or technology. 

With that in mind, I try to market in a way that’s cost-effective, and respects our position as a seed stage company, and the current market dynamics. Constraints force creativity, and it’s a lot of fun to try to outmaneuver the competition without throwing loads of money at marketing.

As VP of Marketing you have a daily stand-up with your sales team. What are the benefits of this? What are some of the important feedback loops needed to help both teams - marketing and sales - be more successful?

We are joined at the hip with our sales team for a number of reasons. I consider myself the pipeline quarterback, and I need to understand the status of all the deals in our sales funnel and how we can successfully advance them. Most times, it’s purely in the hands of the sales team, and I merely provide ancillary support, but if there are occasions when I can do more (e.g. provide an introduction to someone I know who might be an advocate for us), I do so.

The primary benefits of being an integrated revenue team (sales + marketing as one) are that it provides an immediate feedback loop on what problems customers actually face (as opposed to what we believe they face), what messaging resonates, and to know definitively where people are learning about us. It also allows us to be in sync on what we’re saying, and to generate ideas collaboratively and create campaigns that are comprehensive and consistent across all touchpoints. 

Marketers are often tasked with providing ‘sales-ready’ leads to their sales teams.  What does it mean for a lead to be ‘sales-ready’? What are some of the challenges of arriving at a shared understanding of what this means across both departments?

I hate the word ‘leads’ because it’s inhuman, and antithetical to my philosophy about marketing, which is that we are trying to connect with people who can benefit from using our product. I prefer to use ‘potential customers’ instead. I know most people would consider it a matter of semantics, but the words we use have a tremendous impact on how we conduct ourselves. We try to do business in a way that feels more human and relationship-centered, not merely transactional. Yes, there’s a job to be done, and  yes, that job is to grow our business, but we’re not interested in doing it in a way that feels devoid of humanity.

Because we’re a very early-stage startup, we’re focused on logo acquisition, and hence, our metrics reflect our goals. We’ve eliminated the traditional notion of marketing qualified leads, or MQLs from our approach, so in essence, all our potential customers are ‘sales-ready’. That means we only consider potential customers who have a need and a timeline (as opposed to a conventional budget, need, authority and timeline) in our measurements. This will change as we grow larger, naturally, but this is where we are today.

You recently launched a new cybersecurity podcast - The Storm and the Light - at Oxeye.  Can you tell us a little bit about it?  How does the podcast align with some of your marketing goals? 

The description of The Storm and the Light encapsulates the goals of the podcast -

“The Storm and the Light dives beneath the surface to bring you the stories of people from the world of cybersecurity, shining a light on who they really are, and what made them the people they are today. Along the way, we will strive to understand our guests better, and glean lessons from their lives that might inspire us, and help us become better people and professionals.“

I felt that there was a void in the cybersecurity podcasting world of the stories behind the personas, and Oxeye is trying to fill it.

We understand that traditional selling approaches are fast becoming archaic. People are sick and tired of being sold to aggressively, and being asked for a meeting right after a first LinkedIn interaction. Buyers now look for information within their own networks - what some people refer to as “dark social”. This isn’t really different than before - we place more weight on the opinions of the people who we trust or who share similar professional profiles as us - but the magnitude of the shift has forced everyone to rethink how to market and sell. One truth remains, though - that people will never buy from a company they’ve never heard of - so the podcast is one of numerous investments we’re making to ensure that the first human-to-human point of contact that occurs during a sales cycle is not the first time a potential customer has heard about us. It’s a long-term play, but one we feel very optimistic about. 

InfoQ recently sat down with Adam DuVander, author of the book “Developer Marketing Does Not Exist,” which teaches marketers how to authentically engage with developers as a way of attracting them to a particular product.  Adam is a developer turned journalist turned marketer.  He’s tracked the rise of APIs as the editor of ProgrammableWeb and his journalistic approach - combined with his developer background - has provided him with the unique ability to empathize with software engineers when it comes to content creation.  

InfoQ: How did you get the idea for the title of your book? If it holds true, should we all be looking for new jobs?

DuVander: Ha! Don’t worry. Developer marketers exist! It's their job to make sure developers don’t think the marketing exists. The idea for the title came about because the best marketing won’t look like marketing to the right audience. That is especially true for developers and other technical audiences.

InfoQ: It’s a fairly common mantra in our industry that all developers are “marketing averse.”  How did this happen and why won’t developers give us their phone numbers?

DuVander: It comes down to trust. Developers have been burned by marketing promises before. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. The downside here is that even the great developer products, the ones that are as good as they say, need to watch out for this signal. One tiny thing to look out for: don’t use words like “simple,” “easy,” or “scalable.” A developer’s job is to spot edge cases and those words can’t possibly be true for every situation.

InfoQ: In software development, we have this concept of “the developer experience,” and there are many discussions happening today around how to improve it via a mix of tools, processes, and culture.  What does “Developer Experience” mean from a marketing perspective?

DuVander: The very first chapter of the book covers developer experience, which a lot of people translate as “documentation.” First, it’s more than that. And secondly, I put that chapter first because it’s foundational. You can attract all the developers you want to your content, but what if the experience afterwards is terrible? That’s why it should matter to marketers, too.

InfoQ: What is “Time to Hello World” and why is it important?

DuVander: This metric gets a lot of attention in developer experience circles. While knowing the exact amount of time isn’t that important, you want developers to have a smooth first experience. What I think gets missed in this concept is why you should care about it. The goal is not hello world (the simplest possible project). The goal is to take the next step. I get much more excited about what comes after hello world.

InfoQ: What role do sample applications play in the developer experience?  What makes for a great sample application?

DuVander: At their best, sample applications are use cases put to code. They are an excellent next step after hello world. Sample applications inspire solutions developers might not have thought about or help them see how your product addresses their problems. The very best sample apps will have complete code and a tutorial to provide context. I know it’s kind of trite to mention Twilio or Stripe related to developer experience, but… one of my favorite examples is Twilio’s appointment reminders sample app. It’s actually seven examples, once you take language selection into account. It uses Twilio’s product, but it’s laser-focused on a specific use case.

InfoQ: In your book, you talk about the ‘DX Index’, a rating system that consists of 13 criteria used to measure the developer experience around API documentation and website.  Can you highlight some of these criteria and why they’re important?

DuVander: Of course! We’ve already talked about a couple of them: getting started tutorial and sample applications. Another important one is programming language support. You’ll have a much better chance converting a developer if you already have tools for their language. Can I share one more? This is a deeper cut and it’s often outside a marketer’s control: a self-serve experience. Developers want to try out your product without talking to someone—that’s why they won’t give you their phone numbers!

InfoQ: Software developers naturally want to begin being productive with a tool or product - writing code, as it were - as soon as possible.  Are the ‘developer experience’ requirements different for a software architect?  What about other, technical, ‘decision maker’ roles?

DuVander: Yes, we’ve found there’s usually an analogous experience for other technical people. You might frame your product around complementary tools rather than programming languages, for example. Architects still want to understand how your product works and the best way is to see it in action. I know Apple sells a lot of devices sight unseen, but I bet they sell a lot more after someone gets to use it.

InfoQ: Creating - and more importantly, maintaining - a developer blog can feel like a daunting task.  What are some of the fundamentals - not only for consistent content creation - but for quality content creation?

DuVander: Oh my, that’s a huge question! First, consistent does not necessarily mean high volume. I could tell quality content published on a regular basis over something that isn’t very technical or is hastily published. You want to create evergreen, relevant content. And stay away from vanity metrics.

InfoQ: What’s the difference between a tutorial and a technical guide and where does each one fit in the developer marketing funnel?

DuVander: The way I’ve defined “guides” in the book is very different from tutorials. In fact, they each have their own chapters. Guides are usually a higher level, explaining a topic completely outside the context of your product. A tutorial is more likely focused on solving a very specific problem, with the exact steps to complete it. A guide may contain a tutorial as one element, but a tutorial might also live on your blog, in your documentation, alongside a sample app, or even on someone else’s site.

InfoQ: How can SEO tools be used to determine what content to produce? Are there any tools that you’d recommend?

DuVander: SEO tools help you understand the words developers use to describe their problem, as well as a rough idea of the relative number who use those words. That’s valuable, but it’s not everything. We use ahrefs on our client projects, but you need to think way beyond the keywords that come back. What’s the story that can tie these keywords together? How can they be framed so there’s relevance to your product?

InfoQ: One of the central tenets of your book is to help developers solve problems that don’t require the use of any product.  This might sound counterintuitive to a marketer tasked with driving engagement and sign-ups for a particular product.  How are the two ideas actually connected?

DuVander: There’s a reason I call this the developer content mind trick! It is counterintuitive. This type of content helps developers let down their skeptic guard. When you talk about problems outside of your product, you build the trust that you know how to solve those types of problems.

InfoQ: If the problem(s) that your product claims to solve do not yet exist in the market, how should you approach talking about your offerings?  

DuVander: Companies and products are founded on opinionated solutions. Another product may not solve the problem the same way, but the problems are still there. This can actually be a great place for a marketer to start with content concepts, something we teach in our technical content strategy training. If you know what developers will attempt to build without you, you’ve found your biggest competitor.

InfoQ: On the digital marketing front, what’s the difference between advertising and sponsorship?  Do they typically have different metrics and success criteria?  Can you share an example?

DuVander: Advertising typically allows you to measure conversions right away. You might even pay per click on a broad platform that allows you to target the right audience. That’s great, but developers will be at their most skeptical, if they’re even there. Many developers have ad blockers and other technology to filter these messages. And that’s before you get to their most powerful filter—their brain. Sponsorship, on the other hand, allows you to access a community through someone who has already built trust. The downside is that it’s much less trackable, but it builds goodwill with developers. 

InfoQ: What are the advantages of ‘renting an audience/community’ vs. building your own?

DuVander: Here’s the good news: you don’t have to choose, because one of those isn’t possible. You can’t build a community. You can only participate in existing communities and nurture the developers that show an interest in your product. From what I’ve observed, it’s hard to be successful by purely buying access. You need to follow that up with meaningful interactions. Content certainly helps there, but this is a much bigger topic that likely involves developer relations depending on your type of company.

InfoQ: What advice would you give to marketers looking to reach developers in 2023?

DuVander: It’s an exciting time! There’s a lot of opportunity to solve big developer problems. All signs point to organizations being asked to build more with fewer resources. Technical products like yours help make that happen. Be strategic about how you deploy your content. A lot of your success is determined up front by how well the content addresses real developer problems and whether you can educate authentically.

In part II of our interview, Cody De Arkland, Director of Developer Relations at LaunchDarkly, shares some advice for marketing teams that are struggling to produce good technical content consistently, how to tailor your content for software practitioners, and how content creation teams can work effectively with demand generation teams.  Finally, he asserts that all marketing activities - whether it be advertising, nurturing leads, or writing a blog post - have one fundamental goal: to create the next interaction. 

Read Part I - The Core Tenets of Technical Marketing: Cody De Arkland

InfoQ: Content creation continues to be an ongoing challenge for many marketing teams; however, if done right, it still remains one of the most rewarding investments of time and resources. What advice would you give to marketing teams that are struggling to produce good technical content, consistently?

De Arkland: A lot of people say they want practitioner-focused content, but in reality, they want more leads, or they want more response to ads, as just an example. Those two things aren't necessarily married to each other. If your technical content is a path to get those things, then you need to invest in the technical content. 

There are a couple of ways you can do that. 

You can bring on headcount. You can look and say, I want really good technical writers to build this for me, but you're going to pay for it. Now you're paying someone on salary to be a content creator for you, as opposed to paying an agency or paying a group to help source that for you. That's the other path: paying someone to actually do that, and having people internally who can help you review. That said, I think it’s really important for there to be a sense of authenticity to your technical content.   

I don't want to name drop, but I've worked with companies before who are not very technical companies—their product is not very technical—but they know that technical content wins practitioners, so they really want technical content. 

But the message that you're putting out about your product isn't that, so it's hard for me to be authentic about something that your product isn't authentic about. That's the thing— be intentional about the content you want to create. If you want technical stuff, hire technical people or work with technical firms who can help you. Do this while still being rooted in who you are and what you do.

InfoQ: When targeting practitioners, what’s the ideal level of complexity for a message or content piece?

De Arkland: I think that people often go for the complex use cases, because they look cool, but they're not always grounded in reality of what people are looking to consume. Understand your market and understand who your practitioners are. If you're an infrastructure company, but you're positioning a ton of coding things or a ton of real development, code push, Git, stuff like that, it's probably not going to land the same way as introductory content would. 

Your content should meet your customers where they’re at. If your company is a young company in a newly defined space, most of your practitioners are going to be newer practitioners in that space. Doing the 5% use case versus the 90% how-to-do-thing use case is important.

I'm always a fan of quality over quantity. It sounds like an obvious thing, but in my experience, it comes up a lot. There are a lot of what I would call traditional marketers who are like, "More noise is better. Let's do the 10 blog posts." 

For me, I'll get turned off by a brand if I go and see five blog posts that are half complete or that are two paragraphs long. My impression will be, “you guys didn't even try. You didn't even put forth the effort.”

However, if I go somewhere and I'm getting three blog posts, but they are high quality, I can follow them. I can execute on the steps. I walk away learning something. I'll remember that. My impression will be that this company produces good content, so I'm going to continue going there and look at more of their stuff. Being aware of your reputation with your readers is important.

InfoQ:  How can content creators and contributors work effectively with demand generation teams?  

De Arkland: There's a cool story here that I think is worth sharing. I tend to be a contributor. Within the marketing group here, I was one of the earlier, deeply technical people. I quickly got really close to the people who were doing demand, not intentionally, but just because they were producing a lot of outbound content. 

However, they were having to work with a lot of recycled content. They were taking other stuff that had been written, rewording it a little bit and trying their best to put it forward because that's what they had. 

When I came in, they're like, "You like to write. You like to talk about this stuff. Can we try some things?" 

They're now my favorite team to work with, because they come with clear asks and they know what their mission is. They know the campaigns they're trying to run, the outreach they're trying to do. 

They're also open to ideas. When I come in and say, I'd love to just get on a video for three minutes and talk about app modernization and talk about the differences in pipeline strategies, they're like, “yes, we love that idea!” So I record it. Maybe they’ll put it in the newsletter and in a few other places. They essentially ‘scale’ the content. 

As I bring on new hires, I ask them to work closely with the demand gen team, because they're going to amplify whatever content you create widely. We can post it on Twitter, we can post it on LinkedIn, and that's going to have a life of its own. These people are paid to amplify your content. I've done a lot of tech marketing but this is the first time that I’ve intentionally spent a lot of time with the demand gen group. It's one of the biggest lessons I've learned—people that amplify your efforts are gold. 

InfoQ: Can you walk us through the typical customer journey for a lead or prospect that comes in: how do you nurture them, educate them?

De Arkland: I have this foundational belief that all of us in marketing, our job is to create interaction. That's the core job. We all have different ways of doing that. Demand gen might do that via ads. Cody might do that via blogs, and videos. Everyone's job is to create interaction. What I tell my team is we're trying to create the next interaction. When you write the blog, what's the handoff to the next interaction point? 

I think some people do this in the spirit of, “I write the blog and I hope they sign up for an account.” I'm not saying that's wrong. I do believe that if I give you five things, and you step through all of them, and you're doing the next thing every time, my percentage chance of you signing up for an account is much higher than the one-shot approach of, "I wrote the cool blog, go try us out." If I do, I wrote the blog and the blog had you do a thing. 

Then, the next one is maturing that thing. The next thing is another way to grow that thing and roll that out to people. Then, the next one is how to store it. The next one's how to pipeline it. Now you know the whole journey. Throughout that I peppered in a free trial so that you can sign up and take it for a spin. You can see a visual here. Look at all the interaction we're creating there.

I think that being aware of how many of those interactions you complete, and how much they build on each other, increases your chance of success. I try to do that in the content stuff I coach my team on. 

InfoQ: New job titles and roles are always emerging in our industry. For example, we’ve recently seen the emergence of the staff-plus engineer role.  The idea of the staff-plus engineer is that you can move into a leadership role while still staying on the technical path in your career.  The staff-plus engineer or principal engineer provides an alternative career path to people that want to move into senior, decision-making roles without having to lose their technical chops.  From a marketing perspective, how would you message your product to a staff-plus engineer?

De Arkland: I think of the problems that that person is solving. The people who report to them are probably in high demand. They're probably working a lot of hours. They're working on highly complex, high cognitive load tasks. These are people that really value to-the-point content. They don't have the time anymore to read the long-form blog posts on how to do the thing. They will just want to know what the thing does. 

I think of the small infographics that people sometimes create, showing how something works. That's valuable content for them, like straight to the point. It's an amplification of the practitioner messaging. It's even less about how to, but what does it do? How does it reduce the pain points on my practitioners? 

I think developers get a lot of content pushed at them, that is, the message that “using this tool makes your developer life easier so you can deliver for the business.” Developers get that message a lot. As much as people say that developers work in a closet away from all that, they're still acutely aware of what the business needs; they're just working with the code side of it. I think the staff-plus person is really focused on, “what does the thing do, and what's the value to my teams who use the tool?”

InfoQ: In addition to creating a ‘bridge’ between the business and engineering, it sounds like the staff-plus engineer also helps to empower developers in various ways. 

De Arkland: They understand the business side and they value that, but they're also trying to make sure their engineers are successful. They're trying to create career paths. They're trying to reduce friction. They're trying to make their engineers’ days easier, fewer 2 a.m. calls, fewer weekend shifts. Let them have the freedom to go and learn technology. 

Reducing the burden of pressure on engineering teams is the content that they're going to want to see. For an engineer, I might say, “Here's how you use LaunchDarkly. Here's how you build a feature flag.” 

For that staff-plus engineer, I'm going to say, “This lets them move tasks like user targeting back to product management, or out to other groups so they can focus on shipping code, and they can focus on just developing applications instead of supporting all these other groups as well.” It’s a very simplified example but that's how I look at content for them. 

InfoQ recently sat down with Cody De Arkland, Head of Developer Relations at LaunchDarkly, to examine what it means to be a technical marketer and the skills required to be successful in this role.  With the advent of DevOps, he describes some of the new ‘personas’ that have emerged in software development, market trends that he’s seeing around Kubernetes, serverless, and tooling, and the importance of community-building for ISVs.  

InfoQ: Hi Cody, can you tell us a little bit about yourself.  Can you tell us about your professional journey and how you ended up in your current role at LaunchDarkly?

De Arkland: It's been something I think a lot about. I probably think about this every day—the odd way we all ended up here. I know so few people that just went to college for tech, and ended up in tech and now work here. We’ve all had some interesting paths. For me, I started off at a utility company in the helpdesk, helping people create Outlook PST files to store their mail. That was literally where I started. It's just funny how things play out. As I've moved through that role, I ended up doing a lot of cloud-computing stuff. I eventually moved out of customer land and then worked at a major infrastructure vendor, where I worked on a series of events in technical marketing.

I really fell in love with the space of technical marketing. I felt like it was true to practitioners and was important for people who were actually using the tools. The role also aligned well with what the company was trying to accomplish, what it was trying to build, and the ways its customers were trying to use it. It really let me be creative and explore cool ways to do things. 

InfoQ: It’s generally understood in our space that the developer audience is ‘marketing averse,’ at least to overt sales pitches.  Are ‘technical marketers’ viewed with the same skepticism?

De Arkland: I think industry shuns it from a developer standpoint, because it has ‘marketing’ in the title; however, when I hang out with my DevRel friends, or my developer-marketing friends, they're like, "You get this stuff so well." It's interesting because industry perceptions of ‘marketing roles’ haven’t matured as much. We're so focused on someone’s job title that we create these preconceived notions of what that job is. 

Before coming to LaunchDarkly I had a number of tech-marketing roles at various companies. Each role was closer to the developer space, but it still was considered technical marketing.

At LaunchDarkly, I finally got the opportunity to ‘cross the chasm’. It might sound a little corny - but in a beautiful way - I got to bring the technical-marketing role underneath developer relations. In my developer-marketing team, I have developer advocates and technical marketing. They're very similar. They share very similar goals and OKRs, as we call them, and very similar overarching goals. The implementation is just a little bit different. I expect my tech marketers to work a little bit closer with sales and understand the problems they're seeing, and help build developer content off of there. It's still content for developers. On the other side, I expect my developer advocates to be more involved in public speaking, to be more external facing, gathering information from the ‘outside in’. We then come together inside to figure out the best way to move things forward.

InfoQ: What skills does a technical marketer need to be successful in the software development space?

De Arkland: It’s the hands-on stuff. I realize that’s a vague term so I’ll unpack it a bit. It’s about being willing to go hands-on and explore. There are technologies that you can dive into that make you well rounded. Playing in the DevOps space, getting into pipelining, and infrastructure as code, and automation, that's going to serve you well in tech and just universally across all teams. 

The biggest gap that I see is that there are a lot of technical marketers that understand the theory. They go and read a ton about theory, but they don't take the time to go and practice it, to try it out and to explore. I tell people that the best technical marketers that I know love to create engagement. They love to create content that makes people want to see the next thing. They're natural explorers. They spin up the demo account and take it for a spin, and they turn the knob and they ask, “Why does this do that?” They're messaging product managers to ask, “What was the thinking behind how this was built?”

I have a ton of respect for people who will just jump in and take a shot at it, even if they're asking 100 questions. I love when people ask questions. I encourage people to ask questions, but when they go hands-on and actually try it out, you just learn so much more. Right now, I'm building a lot of new-hire plans, because we're growing quickly. When I do new-hire staff, it's focused on getting them hands-on as soon as possible. I don't need you to create content right away. I don't need you to build anything huge or feel the stress of accomplishing a goal. I just want you to get in and feel comfortable with the ergonomics of how this works.

InfoQ: Market research is obviously a bit part of your role.  What are some of the key market trends that you're seeing? What should marketers pay particular attention to?

De Arkland: I think the tech space has always been a very trend-focused space. We see companies starting to adopt a technology, and all of a sudden everybody’s adopting it. After that initial spike of adoption, we eventually get to a place where the ‘path is righted’ and people start using the technology to solve problems. 

Specifically, in the cloud-native space, we saw a spike in people who were adopting things like Kubernetes, just for the sake of adopting Kubernetes, or even microservices, just because it was perceived as the right thing to do. From a trend standpoint, I think we're seeing the shift back to what I call ‘proper architecture’ or use-case driven architecture. We're starting to realize that some of the monoliths we built aren't bad just because they're monoliths. They're built that way for a reason, so we look at different ways to compartmentalize that app, and make it more developable in different chunks. There are ways that people can make that monolith still perform really well. 

At the present, people are moving away from saying, “I need Kubernetes because it's Kubernetes.” Instead,  they're saying, “I need Kubernetes because I need scalability. I want the resiliency aspect of it.” 

We're also hearing people say, “I can run that frontend in something like Azure Container Service, or Amazon's Elastic Container Service, because I just have a standalone container, a standalone system. I don't need it to be distributed with the weight of Kubernetes, because there's an operational cost.” A lot of these early adopters of Kubernetes have now been using it for a couple of years - and looking back - they’re saying the operational uplift to do this was really hard. Now the knowledge and wisdom is coming out, and they’re thinking, “maybe we should focus a little bit more on the ways people aren't using this.”

Other trends, like Lambda and serverless tech are starting to rise up again, but with less of an ‘over-complexity’ than there was before. We’ll continue to see their increase in importance. 

Finally, I think that tooling is starting to make a big comeback. This is a cycle that I see happen a lot: where we move into this ‘theory space’ of the way people work, the ‘people-process story,’ as it were. We focus on that for a couple of years, and when the ‘people and process’ stuff gets to a good steady state, we rotate back to tooling. 

I think we're entering into a tooling phase. Specifically, people are looking at tools to create scale. Infrastructure as code is a great example—ways that people can use these tools to impact many systems, and one administrator can now manage a global fleet of systems remotely. As part of the Great Resignation, people are moving onto new roles. Teams are smaller in some cases, so they need to scale. As a result, I think tooling is making a big comeback around. 

InfoQ: Even with tooling, there are usually different end users that expect different outcomes.  Is ‘Persona-based’ research an important part of your overall research efforts?

De Arkland: It definitely is. We tend to carve things up a little interestingly in the group. I'm responsible for the practitioner personas. There's a wide variety in there. That's something else we're realizing: it’s that the developer persona is no longer everything. That role has actually changed a bit; you have the developer who's like the traditional coder, "I'm building the app. I'm writing code." 

Then, you have the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), who's making sure platforms are up and running and staying alive. They often get rolled into the ‘Developer’ bucket.  Finally, you have the DevOps engineer who's usually doing more enterprise automation, or building pipelines, or ensuring scale and things like that.

I tend to handle a lot of those practitioner-style personas. The research for these varies. A lot of times it requires conversations in the community. There’s a lot of legwork required from my developer advocates, attending and learning from conferences, for instance. 

The business side of LaunchDarkly does a lot of research on the “buyer persona”, and the type of stuff that ‘Directors’ are purchasing. Then there’s the feedback we get from market analysts.  In the end however, we are a little bit more biased towards the community perspective, trying to get a beat on what's happening on the street. It's never 100% right. There's a practice and a science to it that bounces either way from time to time, but I think we're doing ok.

InfoQ:  There appears to be this myth that with everything moving to the cloud, and presumably becoming ‘self-service’, that eventually, we won’t need operations teams anymore. In reality, it looks like just the opposite is happening: that we need more operations folks, those with the skills to manage a new kind of operational overhead associated with the cloud. Is that what you're seeing as well?

De Arkland: Absolutely. I think what's really cool to see is that a lot of those operational roles that used to be just the person hammering away in the data center, making sure stuff is running, they're becoming consultants now inside of the business, to help teams understand how to develop properly. 

I can't think of a better group than the SRE team who's been troubleshooting, monitoring, and managing platforms, to come into my application team and say, "Here's the most successful group inside of our company that does this, architects the system this way. Their system never goes down." 

That's the person that I want. I think we're seeing that operational roles are definitely more needed now than ever. There's that whole myth: cloud is going to eliminate the operations groups. It's just fundamentally not true. I think what's really cool is the way that these roles have become elevated inside of enterprises now. They become, in a lot of ways, developer advocates and advocates for good architecture inside of those enterprises. The number of projects I see where an SRE ends up as the trusted advisor is just incredible. 

InfoQ: For a while, it appeared as if Developers *had* become the new operations team. 

De Arkland: There's a lot of truth to that. I think we have to think of the path of how this happened. Developers started buying cloud because they created their code push. They were able to do their code push. A leader said, "You have a credit card; run it. Expense the cost, just get the platform up; we'll deal with the regulation a bit later. Get it up and running." 

Developers did. 

Now, we're needing to deliver things so fast, and there are so many ‘asks’ that developers are like, “I didn't realize my entire job was going to be managing an AWS account and Azure accounts, too!” 

They want to get back to building code and shipping code, and now cloud operations are getting moved over to SRE. Infrastructure teams are maturing into the ‘Cloud-Ops’ team. Developers want the freedom to use the cloud, but not necessarily the responsibility to have to operationally manage it. 

InfoQ: From the perspective of a software vendor, what constitutes community building? Why is building community important for developer evangelists and technical marketers?

De Arkland: I think that there's a harsh truth that you have a community in tech— whether you manage it or not, is the question—but you have a community. If you're choosing not to manage it, then people's opinions and what echoes down on the internet is going to be the truth of what people find when they search for you. 

We have a responsibility to do something there, or we should. I think a community is about investing in knowledge and information and accessibility for people who might be using your product and being present. I think it's a cornerstone of developer marketing and doing developer marketing. 

If you're ignoring the community in those roles, there's no positive outcome for you there. I think it's a hard thing for the business to always process because community building is an investment. It’s something you have to actively do. It doesn't have an immediate return, but it has a return over time.

Read Part II - Creating Content that Connects with Practitioners: Cody De Arkland

In this interview, Anadelia Fadeev, Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Teleport, describes some of the biggest changes that have emerged in digital marketing, demand gen, and events over the course of the pandemic.   She talks about the future of technical conferences, the benefits and limitations of using “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) as a success metric, and how sales and marketing teams can best work together, using both shared goals and terminology.  Finally, she emphasizes why building trust with developer audiences is paramount to all other marketing activities. 

InfoQ: Anadelia, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Teleport?

Anadelia Fadeev: My role here is in marketing. I've been at Teleport for almost two years now. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all your infrastructure. My job in marketing is to generate awareness and interest in Teleport. Given that we're open source, what I especially like about it is that anyone can get started today for free.

InfoQ: With two years of pandemic life now behind us - from a marketing and demand gen perspective - what are some of the biggest changes you’ve observed in our industry?

Anadelia: There are several changes that I think are permanent and positive. 

One is that people want to consume content on their own terms. I think that with events shutting down and people doubling down on webinars, for instance, it's forced us to produce content in various mediums and forums and has allowed people to consume it at their own pace.  I think many companies would agree that the pandemic has forced us to think about new ways through which we can share content in a more asynchronous way so that, regardless of where you're physically located, what time zone you're in, your preferred method of communication, there's something that will fit your needs. That's one.

Second, the pandemic has put everything into perspective and has made us realize how much human connections actually matter. Whether you're trying to connect with your community or your coworkers, finding opportunities for those casual interactions - where you can actually build trust and connect as humans - is incredibly important. The past couple of years have really put that into perspective. Personally, I've been more intentional about making time to make connections.

Finally, the pandemic has reinforced the importance of communities, and how it should be all about quality, not quantity. For example, event organizers have realized that it’s not about having the largest event with tens of thousands of people and a really broad slate of topics.  Instead, there’s been more interest in highly focused events where people can make more meaningful connections. 

For example, I was at KubeCon last year, and I noticed how many people were skipping the large afterparties and instead they were joining smaller events where they could reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. This  goes back to my second point on making more meaningful  human connections.

InfoQ: What’s the future of technical conferences? Will our industry be going back to fully in-person events, continuing with virtual conferences, or taking a hybrid approach?

Anadelia: I think it's going to be hybrid. It goes back to my earlier point of people wanting to consume content on their own terms. For some people, in-person will work, and for others, it won't. Giving people choices is extremely important. I do think there's an appetite for having those face-to-face interactions. Whether you’re on a Zoom call with your video on, talking on a Slack channel with fellow attendees, or chatting with people in the hallway - at the end of the day - people are seeking the connection and the closeness to communities, regardless of what format that might be.

InfoQ: Shifting gears a bit, “Marketing Qualified Leads” (MQLs) have become an important metric in measuring the success of demand gen campaigns.  What are the benefits and limitations of MQLs?

Anadelia: MQLs really are a way to prioritize leads for sales and potentially gauge the quality of those leads. The reality is that this is not a perfect system. The problem is when too much emphasis is put into this metric. 

If you’re selling enterprise software you have more than one person influencing the deal: you might have someone doing the research, someone who will be the day to day user, you have your economic buyer, and so forth. You have multiple touch points across several people in the company, and MQLs simply don't show the full picture of that buyer's journey.

InfoQ: Is there another metric that marketers should be focusing on?

Anadelia: My recommendation is for marketing teams to really focus on pipeline. Pipeline is the end result of your marketing and sales development activities. It’s still important to track funnel metrics but the reality is that every business is different, every buyer is different. Every sales cycle is probably going to look different for each company. We can't just apply a blanket metric across all companies and say that the most important metric to gauge the success of a company is their MQL to opportunity conversion rate. It's impossible that you'll be comparing the same thing across each company. 

What really matters at the end of the day is to ask yourself: are the activities that you're doing across sales and marketing producing the pipeline that you need for your business? If the answer is no, then you need to start digging into each funnel stage to understand where the issues might be, and try to resolve that. Emphasizing on MQLs doesn't really show the full picture.

InfoQ: For companies selling enterprise software, like Teleport, do you have any tips on how marketing and sales teams should best work together? Are there any best practices or anti-patterns that you’ve observed?

Anadelia: Going back to my earlier point, really, the focus should be pipeline. The times where I've seen conflict between sales and marketing is when the teams are not speaking the same language. Marketing is focused on leads and MQLs and sales is thinking about opportunities and pipeline. If you have a focus on pipeline, then you're both working towards the same goal.

The other times where I've seen conflict between sales and marketing is when people use the word “credit” when talking about pipeline composition. 

This is a word that I've banned in my teams because marketing should own the entire pipeline number. We can discuss attribution models all day long, but the reality is that in enterprise software, it's a joint effort. Like I said before, you have multiple people, and you have multiple touch points happening between sales and marketing. It's a joint effort. 

You can have a great website where people convert, but without good sales follow up, you're not going to book the meeting, or you can have great outbound but without good messaging, it might not drive a response. If you’re in demand generation, your customer is Sales, which is why we should be focused on the same goal: generating revenue for our company.

InfoQ: Teleport has recently run several ad campaigns on InfoQ.  What were the goals of these campaigns and were they successful?

Anadelia: At this stage of our company, we're focused on brand awareness. We’re a startup and our product is open source. Really, what we want to do is to let the world know we exist and we can help people solve their access problems. For us, that means creating content that's highly relevant and provides value to our community. 

What I like about working with InfoQ is its focus on quality content. Our program is not an ad program; instead, it’s about us adding value to our communities and we see that in the form of traffic back to our website and the number of pages visited on our site. The content is relevant!

InfoQ: Any additional advice you’d like to give to your fellow B2B marketers? 

Anadelia: I’d like to re-emphasize that marketing is not about capturing leads and turning them into MQLs. Because if that was it, and our job ends at, “I've created a lead, and now it's an MQL,” we would simply find easy ways to create leads and turn them into MQLs We’d all be billionaires, because we’ve figured it out!

The reality is that our audience and our communities are real people who have busy lives. They also have goals, priorities, dreams, and things they like to do in their free time. Their job is just one portion of their life. 

Our goal as marketers is to build trust with our communities, so that we have the opportunity to introduce ourselves to them. That comes with trust. No one owes us their time. We have to earn that. We have to earn people's time. We have to do that through trust, and it goes back to the content. 

As marketers, we should be asking ourselves: “What am I doing to provide value to someone?”,  so that they give me time to introduce myself to them. However people call it - branding, community building, or you name it - it describes the same thing, which is, you want to earn people's trust, and you do that by first providing something of value to them.

Over the last eight years, Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka has been part of an exciting journey, helping her company Payara grow from a small, open source project to a full on business built around their enterprise Java platform and application server. In this interview, Tasarz-Sochacka talks about how InfoQ is helping Payara achieve its goals of driving adoption while educating a global Java audience about the platform, what it does, and how it can help them.

InfoQ: Dominika, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Payara?

Tasarz-Sochacka: I’ve been with Payara since the very beginning, which I’m really proud of. I am currently marketing manager and community builder at Payara. My role goes back to the time when Payara was just a project, and it was set up by a company called C2B2. At C2B2 we were dealing with all sorts of Java EE application servers and Java middleware. That was back in 2014 when it was announced that GlassFish is no longer being supported, so we found an opportunity there to potentially deliver GlassFish support. 

About two years later, we realized that we needed to do more, and that we actually needed to create a separate product. That’s how Payara Platform or Payara Server, was started. We started working on the actual application server that was derived from GlassFish, at that point. In 2016, we grew enough to actually register Payara as a separate business, a separate company. That’s where it all really started. I’m really happy to have seen it grow from an idea and a project within one business, and then actually developing into a separate business.

At the moment, I’m managing our entire marketing team. I’ve got a really great team of experts working with me. Our main focus at this point, other than I think the typical one for marketing teams as lead generation, is driving our product’s adoption and growing the community of users because we are an open source business. We always strive for growing the community.

InfoQ: How is the Payara application server uniquely positioned in today’s market?

Tasarz-Sochacka: It’s interesting because application servers have been around for many years. They are now considered – if not old – then at least a very stable piece of technology in the Java industry. What we see with our customers and in the market, is that application servers are still very relevant, even if they’re not as sexy as they used to be. 

Although the industry is moving very fast, most users and customers are usually at least a few years behind the “bleeding edge” technology trends. While they do eventually catch up, it’s a slow process, and probably a bit slower than innovator-stage companies like ours want to see, because we would really want them all to be on this new, shiny technology. It does take time though. 

InfoQ: How did you hear about InfoQ?

Tasarz-Sochacka: I personally have been an InfoQ reader myself for many years. I started in the Java industry, now thinking about it, a long time ago now, about 10 years ago, maybe more. I can’t remember exactly when I started looking at the InfoQ website, but it’s been a number of years. It was always one of the places for me to go to read about industry news, update myself on what’s going on, to see what the competitors are up to, and to do some market analysis. I personally discovered InfoQ by reading about what’s happening in the Java industry. 

InfoQ: Can you tell us a little bit about the campaign that Payara is currently running on InfoQ?

Tasarz-Sochacka: We are currently running a Topic Sponsorship campaign on InfoQ, and have been running it for a few months now. InfoQ is hosting a few of our technical resources that are both educational on the technologies that are close to Payara, as well as about Payara Platform itself. The focus of the campaign is to generate awareness around our technologies, and to generate leads.

InfoQ: What have some of your strategic goals been this year? How has InfoQ helped you make some progress on those goals?

Tasarz-Sochacka: Lead generation is always one of those strategic goals for my team, and for a majority of marketing teams. Our InfoQ campaign is definitely contributing to that. We are able to generate leads through the downloads of our technical resources that we are hosting on InfoQ. 

Growing awareness around our product and increasing product adoption is also a really big deal for us. As an open source product company, we want as many Java EE and Jakarta EE users to know about us, and to try the Payara Platform which they can download for free from our website. 

Our InfoQ campaign is helping us achieve our goals of driving adoption and educating Java users about the Payara platform, what it does, and how it can help them. InfoQ is helping us reach a global Java audience, which we perhaps wouldn’t be able to reach via any other channel. 

While increasing brand awareness is important through display advertising, our primary goal is to drive adoption through education about our products and the underlying technology. This is what InfoQ really helps us with. 

InfoQ: How would you describe the quality of leads that you’re generating on InfoQ?

Tasarz-Sochacka: The leads that we receive from InfoQ are usually at the very early stage of the Payara Platform journey. I would say they are very much at the top of the funnel. However, this is the approach we are taking intentionally, because we believe in educating our users through high quality technical content. 

On InfoQ, we are hosting guides and how-to’s and are occasionally advertising our upcoming events via the InfoQ weekly newsletter and special reports. These leads are, as they sign up, at the top of the funnel, at which point we begin to nurture them further. In time, they get qualified, if they really do find interest in our solution. The leads we get from InfoQ are perfect to help us kick off the nurturing process. 

InfoQ: We know that developers don’t like to be directly sold to.  They generally like to “try before they buy”.  

Tasarz-Sochacka: Exactly. It’s even more important when you are an open source company and you actually provide the product that is out there to be used. It’s only later on when you use it in a specific way that you may require an enterprise version, which is obviously what we provide. Before they are ready for it however, we need to make sure they are ready for it. This is what InfoQ is helping us with: to educate them, but also first to just let them know that we are out there.

InfoQ: Are there any lead nurturing approaches that have worked particularly well for you? Again, you’ve already talked about the importance of educating your readers, first and foremost, before talking about the product. Are there any other approaches you’ve taken that have worked particularly well for you?

Tasarz-Sochacka: High quality technical content is what helps us most. This is through different ways. Obviously, we can go through a regular way of just having a piece of content out that is downloaded and you generate leads, and then you nurture them further. As an open source company however, we also put a lot of ungated content out there that is just there to be seen and to drive awareness, such as blog posts. A very important part of our offering as an open source company is a technical blog that you can subscribe to.  This allows readers to be taken on a technical journey to learn about the product and to decide when they are ready to use it. But it’s all very much based on the content we put out there. We have quite a strong technical marketing content strategy, and this is what’s been working best for us.

Maybe another area would be just working with the Java communities and already established communities and user groups, as well as all the companies that are just doing something similar to us, but they’re not directly competitors. We work a lot with other vendors where we can combine our expertise, we can combine our products and provide an offering: both open source and enterprise. We’ve got a couple of those partnerships that we’re working on right now. These types of partnerships are bringing a lot of results for us both on the adoption side and on the enterprise sales side.

InfoQ: How has your overall experience been advertising on InfoQ?

Tasarz-Sochacka: It’s been very positive so far. We’ve received plenty of impressions on our ads alone, if I look at the current campaign that we are running. We’ve already hit our lead target about halfway through the campaign, which is amazing. And we’re getting more leads on top of that. 

The communication with the InfoQ team has always been really smooth. If we ever need to make any changes, or if we have any ideas, these are being discussed pretty much straight away. If there are changes, they are applied pretty much right away as well. Our experience advertising on InfoQ has been very positive.

InfoQ: Dominika, would you recommend advertising on InfoQ to a peer? If so, why?

Tasarz-Sochacka: Yes, definitely. If you operate in the Java space, and are looking to reach out to a wider audience, you can be sure that the global Java community hangs out on InfoQ. InfoQ is very much to the point with regards to content. There are the five overarching personas or technology areas that you can target. What I also really like is that you can micro-target your campaign along very granular topics, such as Java, microservices, or cloud. 

If your focus is on raising awareness and educating your users about your solution, then InfoQ is the right place to go, because that’s what people are looking for on InfoQ. If they can find the right answers from you, then you get really good quality leads, and then it’s all in your hands to nurture them further. 

We haven’t really done any big sponsorship campaigns like this before. There have been lots of reasons for it. One of the reasons is that it’s a big investment, but then you don’t always get the results. We did try a couple different places before, and we picked InfoQ based on the results that we saw from our first campaign, which we were really happy with. I think for an open source business, it’s really important to be where your audiences hang out. Our audience is all online, and they hang out on InfoQ.

Learn more about advertising on InfoQ.com and sponsoring QCon events - Download the Media kit.

InfoQ recently sat down with John Staudenraus, Digital Marketing Manager at VMware Tanzu.  Tanzu – a portfolio of products for building and managing Kubernetes-applications – launched in March 2020, right around the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit.  

John describes how he had to quickly change his approach to getting in front of his target audience and how InfoQ helped him reach his strategic personas. 

He talks about the performance of his recent campaign and how InfoQ helped him not only generate a pipeline of quality leads, but also expand awareness amongst an important new audience for VMware.

John, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at VMware?

John Staudenraus: I’m a Digital Marketing Manager at VMware Tanzu. My role is to help market to the developer space. I’ve been helping create new avenues for personas that VMware typically hasn’t targeted in the past. I’m managing some new outlets that haven’t been a traditional VMware audience.

InfoQ represents a new audience for us. One of the biggest positives we’ve seen is around awareness, because VMware isn’t really thought of as being in the software engineering space. I think just getting it out there that we offer a portfolio of products for developers – and the fact that we have some of the leaders in the industry sharing that message with this audience – is probably some of the main benefits that we’ve seen.

InfoQ: VMware has traditionally been a company focused on the software infrastructure side of things, such as virtualization.  As the company has grown – through acquisitions and such – how has its target market changed?

Staudenraus: I think VMware has – from my understanding – gone through multiple phases as a company since that virtualization phase. They’ve traditionally been more of an infrastructure play, and right now, they’re moving into the application transformation phase and starting to look at ways to bridge the gap between the infrastructure and the application side of things. They’re looking at more of the DevOps roles. Software engineers are now an important persona for VMware.

InfoQ:  It’s been a little over a year since you first started advertising on InfoQ. How has the experience been for you overall?

Staudenraus: I think it’s been extremely positive. I think that the engagement that we’ve gotten on InfoQ has been really strong. In particular, the assets that we’ve been running have seen great engagement. We’ve seen a lot of downloads of our content. InfoQ has been stronger than many of our other channels.

InfoQ: InfoQ’s mission is to help technical leaders drive innovation at their companies. How has InfoQ’s editorial approach helped you in your marketing efforts?

Staudenraus: I think that it aligns well with the personas that we want to target along with the same subject matter that aligns with our products.

InfoQ: Kubernetes has been an important topic for your campaign this past year.  Isn’t one of the co-creator of Kubernetes, Joe Beda, still at VMware?

Staudenraus: Indeed, Joe Beda is still here at VMware. He and Craig McLuckie were the co-creators (of Kubernetes) at Google. They left, started their own company, and then they were acquired by VMware.

One of the cool things at VMware is that there are a lot of people that have been leaders in the space that are around. It really helps us as we are looking to the future, that they see the roadmap and understand where the technology is going. It’s allowed us to create the products that really fill that need for the developers.

InfoQ: What have some of your strategic goals been this past year? How has InfoQ helped you make progress on some of these goals?

Staudenraus: With the timing of VMware Tanzu launching (in March 2020), and then the pandemic hitting, it definitely changed how we had to go about getting in front of our audience.  Our approach certainly became much more digital. InfoQ really helped with this because we couldn’t rely on the typical conferences and in-person stuff, the field marketing, etc.  We basically had to go 100% digital.

InfoQ: Have you guys achieved your goals in the last 12 months given some of the perceived setbacks?

Staudenraus: Yes. We have hit our numbers each quarter despite the pandemic.

InfoQ: Are there any lead nurturing tactics that have worked particularly well for you in terms of getting people qualified, and pushed further along the funnel? Any tactics or best practices you can share?

Staudenraus: I don’t think that there’s anything really out of the ordinary that has worked for us that probably isn’t working for others. We’ve put a pretty big emphasis on lead nurture, and continuing to put them through the funnel. 

Our webinars have been extremely successful at generating pipeline. Typically, those are people that have already been in our nurture, so I think continuing to stay in front of them and providing them with relevant content is important. When we get top-of-funnel leads we segment them out, so that the content that they’re getting through the nurtures and through the webinar offers are pretty relevant to them.

InfoQ: Are you able to share any new customer success stories, based on your recent lead gen program at InfoQ?

Staudenraus: What we’re finding is that there are so many touches that come into play in our sales cycle that generally on InfoQ, while it could be the first touch, there’s just so many other things that come through. We are seeing pipeline, which is great. It is a positive number. 

How would you describe the quality of leads that you’ve received from InfoQ?

Staudenraus: I would say that we have received high quality leads from our campaign.  We have a measurable pipeline that is significantly more than other channels targeting this audience.  The pipeline number keeps growing as we continue our nurture to these leads and as more become qualified.

Would you recommend advertising on InfoQ to a peer. If so, why?

Staudenraus: Recommend – Absolutely.  The engagement with InfoQ feels more of a partnership than a client/vendor relationship.  The customer service that InfoQ provides is much greater than what you would typically find in an ad platform.  They have taken much of the heavy lifting during the process and make standing up campaigns super easy.  The wide variety of ad formats is also great as you aren’t stuck with just running banners that rarely generate leads.  The lead volume and quality have been great as well.  This has become a major source of Top-of-Funnel leads for us.

Learn more about advertising on InfoQ.com and sponsoring QCon events - Download the Media kit.

Gremlin’s Peter Zawistowicz is responsible for growing and optimizing the sales and marketing funnel. Some of Peter’s top priorities this past year have been to define and grow the emerging Chaos Engineering market while generating a steady stream of qualified leads for his sales team. InfoQ recently sat down with Peter to get his thoughts on how Gremlin’s first InfoQ ad campaigns have performed, as well as what products and tactics have been worked best.

InfoQ: Can you talk a little bit about your particular role at Gremlin?

Zawistowicz: Yes, absolutely. At Gremlin, I lead growth marketing, and that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but at Gremlin basically what that means is that I own growing and optimizing the sales and marketing funnel all the way through to onboarding and expansion. I’m always looking for different ways to get the message of chaos engineering at Gremlin out into the world and to reinforce Gremlin as really the best way of doing that.

InfoQ: Gremlin has been advertising on InfoQ for almost a year now. Can you talk a little bit about how your experience has been overall?

Zawistowicz: This is actually my second company working with InfoQ. I used to advertise on InfoQ when I was at MongoDB so – coming to Gremlin – I was familiar with the platform and with the advertising options. I was also sponsoring the QCon series of conferences at the time so InfoQ and QCon are definitely brands that I was comfortable and familiar with. 

In terms of how Gremlin got started advertising on InfoQ, last Fall, I had learned that your editorial team would be producing an eMag on chaos engineering – a topic of strategic importance to us – so it made perfect sense for us to work together from a sponsorship standpoint.

This was a unique opportunity where a trusted source like InfoQ was saying, “Hey, we think chaos engineering is going to drive some really transformative change” and we were able to latch on to that. 

InfoQ: How did sponsorship of the Chaos Engineering eMag work out for Gremlin?

Zawistowicz: In terms of pure organic interest in this topic, it performed really well. The challenge of being in a position like Gremlin is that we’re basically trying to build out a category. There are actually very few opportunities for us to work with a third party to generate pretty high intent leads. Most of the content that’s middle-bottom of the funnel is something that is exclusively Gremlin. There aren’t a lot of trusted third parties thinking about the topic of chaos engineering right now. We obviously expect that to change and we’re already seeing the change. 

In terms of actual results for us, you know, it was ROI positive. All in all, it was pretty successful.

InfoQ:  The campaign that Gremlin is currently running is a combination of both an eMag sponsorship combined with a traditional content syndication program. How has this “dual approach” – generating top of funnel leads from the eMag and more mid-to-bottom of funnel leads from your white papers – been working for you?

Zawistowicz: Because we’re as early as we are, we have to work higher up the funnel than a lot of other companies. You know, we could basically get away with only bidding on brand terms and we could still hit our number; however, because we’re still educating the market on what chaos engineering is, we really have to take the dual approach. We know that InfoQ has a fairly loyal reader base so it’s a way that they can be introduced to a topic and then dig in further.

InfoQ: Can you shed some light on Gremlin’s approach to lead nurturing? What are some of the tactics that are working well for you?

Zawistowicz: The biggest thing that we want to do when we’re nurturing – which we do primarily through display retargeting and through email nurture – is to make sure that we have a good understanding of the initial impetus for the research in chaos engineering. 

There are a number of different reasons that people start to look into the topic:

• They’re on the back of a pretty serious outage and people at the company are saying, “Hey, we can never let this happen again. What changes can we make to ensure this doesn’t happen?” Preventing outages is a pretty big use case and there’s a certain way that we want to message to that. 

• There are also folks who take a slightly more proactive approach where – if they’re making a pretty significant change to their architecture (maybe they’re migrating to Kubernetes or to microservices for the first time) – they want to ensure that, you know, they’re not making breaking changes.

• Then there’s people who want to just use chaos engineering in a slightly lighter-weight way to ensure that things like alerting and monitoring are set up correctly. They may not have a good way to perturb those systems to know, for instance, that Datadog or New Relic are actually picking up on CPU spikes and alerting within a time frame that’s reasonable.

InfoQ: What have some of your strategic goals been this year and how has InfoQ helped make progress on these goals?

Zawistowicz: Building out the various use cases for chaos engineering has been a big strategic messaging goal. The top-of-funnel lead volume that InfoQ has generated has made it much easier for us to implement and experiment with the types of nurture paths that we were just talking about.  

As far as defining those different use cases and tying them to a specific pain point, that’s also something that we’ve been able to do with our InfoQ leads. This is in part due to your ability to contextually target our assets by topic.  Not many platforms provide you the opportunity to position yourself next to relevant topics in that way.

InfoQ: How would you describe the quality of leads that you’re seeing come in from the InfoQ programs?

Zawistowicz: Once we do get a lead that’s within our ITP, they are generally pretty well versed in the space. The level of education that we have to do for an InfoQ lead is probably lower than someone who found us through some of our (other) advertising programs. 

InfoQ: Were the leads in line with your geo-targeting requirements?

Zawistowicz: The audience on InfoQ is certainly quite broad, especially in terms of geography. As a smaller company, we don’t do business in all parts of the world: we’re focused mostly on the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. We are certainly able to reach that part of InfoQ’s audience. 

That being said, we also see quite a lot of interest from other parts of the world that we’re not yet doing business in. It’s very promising for us because when we are able to expand internationally, we’ll have an audience that’s primed.

InfoQ: Would you recommend advertising on InfoQ to a peer? And if so, why?

Zawistowicz: Yes, I’d absolutely recommend advertising on InfoQ to a peer. I mean, in the enterprise technology space, there are a lot of different channel options but the thing that I look at most frequently when evaluating a new channel is the audience, how well it fits with our target customer, and the maturity of the advertising platform in terms of the different formats and targeting options.  

The reason I recommend InfoQ is the strong overlap of both: the strong audience and IT decision-maker profile along with the variety of different ad formats and targeting options that are really not available from most content syndication and advertising outlets in this space.

I view myself as a discerning consumer in the publications that I choose to read and one of the things that I personally like about InfoQ is that it’s a very credible source of information along with the fact that you do really strong (content creation) work with your advertising partners. Neither is a detriment to the other because you maintain a strong church-state separation. You’re also able to provide a really good sponsor experience, and I think other publications are really struggling to strike that balance.

Learn more about advertising on InfoQ.com and sponsoring QCon events - Download our Media kit.