Investment decisions when building developer communities
tl;dr: In choosing where to spend your developer experience and advocacy dollars, investment in content, documentation, and initial developer experience is the most critical because it has the broadest addressable audience. But you also need to make an investment in more active engagements (Discord, Slack, Github, contributor resources) if you want to ensure involvement in your community is substantive and sticky.
Building channels for developers and growing a developer community should take a tiered approach. You should divide your investment between two tiers:
The vast majority of developers only care about quality documentation, helpful content, and the ease of use of your product, APIs, SDKs, and tooling. They want HOWTOs, technical and product-centric blog posts, “follow the bouncing ball” implementation guides, integrations they can easily find and consume, etc. These needs are why high-quality projects have excellent documentation with their engineers, tech writers, and developer advocates focused generating comprehensive, elegant, and usability-centric content. Everyone generally cites the original gold standard here as folks like Stripe, Twilio, and Heroku. It is also why many open source projects and communities put so much effort into documentation.
This content is the top of the funnel for every developer you engage. It’s likely the first point of contact you’re going to have with 99% of your incoming community and is key to driving adoption. Getting this right is crucial. You should treat your community content, from documentation to tooling, as a product and identify the various user journeys you want to enable, instrument those journeys, build funnels, and use the analytics generated to refine the content.
