What is developer-market fit?

Product Market fit has been talked about ad nauseam. Developer-market fit is different

It’s an easy way of saying (developer product)-market fit. Some companies use developer audiences as their secret weapon for growth. Think Twilio for example.

When a company creates a developer-oriented product or codebase, other than making it functional, there are a lot of areas which need to be considered.

This is best explained through the following diagram :

Simplification of a developer workflow

The X-axis is the most important one here and actually has multiple components within it.

When you think about simplification of a developer workflow there are many opportunities if you look hard and long enough.

The workflow areas which come to mind are:

• Change management: managing and tracking different versions of code using tools like Git.

• Testing and debugging: running tests to ensure that the code is working correctly with different inputs.

• Collaboration and communication: working with other developers, product managers, and stakeholders and creating usable products.

• Deployment: moving code from development to a production environment through a CI/CD pipeline

• Maintenance: monitoring the stability of deployed code and making updates as necessary.

The one area which is not that well thought through when you think about developer workflow is the developer ecosystem

The businesses supported often varies in these development communities. However, you'll see that some systems will take a while to be replaced. Look for systems that are difficult to replace in this ecosystem. You must devise a method of integrating with those systems. Some of these systems might be challenging to interact with (ugh, imagine COBOL files or XML-RPC...)

The other large area where attention needs to be paid to a developer audience is Developer Experience. I have written an article about #dx here.

Usage Frequency

When your tool starts being part of multiple use cases, you have a higher frequency of use.

However, only having a high usage frequency does not mean that you have a good developer market fit.

This is something you have to watch out for. This is a common mistake some developer-oriented companies run into. Most likely what has happened in this case is that you did solve a problem quite well. You actually might have a first mover’s advantage. However, If you only focus in on high usage frequency only, you might not be paying attention to building up developer communities and improving the developer experience. These are much harder to do than building software and therefore ignored.

Code repositories

Let’s assume you have open-sourced your code and it’s in a code repository. As a repository becomes more popular, the number of issues and pull requests submitted by users can become overwhelming, making it difficult to keep up with and respond to them all in a timely manner. However, this is an important part of developer experience.

Your repository may rely on other libraries or frameworks that are also popular and are updated frequently. Keeping up with these changes and ensuring that the repository continues to work with the latest versions can be a challenge.

Managing your community contributions and ensuring that they align with the company’s goals and maintain the code quality can be a challenge.

Summary

Developer-market fit has challenges that are unique. As I mentioned before, understanding developer ecosystems, narrowing down developer personas, and building a thriving community are probably the hardest pieces of developer-market fit.