Most dev tool marketers know they need to reach beyond individual developers. But there’s a big difference between knowing you should target “decision-makers” and actually reaching them. 

The problem goes beyond expanding your audience. You must understand the complex buying journey your product creates, in which developers, product managers, engineering leaders, and executives all play different roles at different times.

This article contextualizes the developer’s role in the process of adopting new dev tools. Understanding devs’ — and other organizational actors’ — levels of involvement will help you create a content strategy that works for decision-makers across the board, from the developer champion to the engineering leader they’re trying to convince.

Technical Problems Attract Multiple Audiences

The CTO at your potential customer sees slow deployments as a technical optimization problem. Their product teams see them as a competitive disadvantage. And their developers? They’re annoyed because of the daily productivity killers hindering them from doing great work. The broken CI/CD pipeline is the cause of all these issues, but each team views it from a different angle. 

To maximize your influence, your marketing must consider all the above perspectives, and more:

• Security worries about deployment vulnerabilities. 
• Customer success sees deployment delays as missed launch commitments. 
• Sales feels the impact when prospects ask about deployment frequency during demos. 
• Finance wants to understand infrastructure cost implications.

Suddenly, you’re not marketing to just developers — you’re marketing to half the organization. It’s enough to make any marketer want to retreat to feature lists and technical specifications.

The instinct is to solve this by creating different campaigns for each audience — CTOs get business case content, developers get technical tutorials, security gets compliance checklists, etc. 

The real challenge is translating between the audiences. When the CTO says ‘improve deployment reliability,’ their developers hear ‘reduce build failures.’ When their product team says ‘faster time-to-market,’ their DevOps team thinks ‘automated rollback capabilities.’ Your marketing needs to bridge these different ways of thinking about the same underlying problems.

These translation challenges matter because technical decisions increasingly involve non-technical audiences. Engineering managers need to justify tool choices to finance. Developers must explain deployment delays to product teams. CTOs present infrastructure investments to executive leadership.

Know Your Developer’s Role (and Help Them Play It)

Understanding multiple audiences is the first of several challenges. You also must determine where developers fit into this complex web of teammates. Their role changes based on your product, their company, and the stage at which you reach them. 

In some deals, developers are your primary champions, driving adoption from the bottom up. In others, they’re the final gatekeepers who can kill a deal after months of business-focused selling.

In the EveryDeveloper marketing continuum, we identified the developer focus of a product:

At the start of the continuum, a developer may only implement a product. At the other end, the developer is the most important (and sometimes only) audience. When we translate these stages to the roles developers play in the buying process, you can start to predict how other audiences will get involved.

These five dev roles will impact your marketing strategies:

• Implementer: With developer-enabled products, developers inherit and deploy solutions chosen by engineering leadership or procurement.
• Consultant: Developers are brought in during evaluation to assess technical feasibility and implementation complexity.
• Supporter: Developers engage early because your product affects their work, even if its primary purpose is to solve a broader organizational problem.
• Champion: Developers find your solution and advocate for company-wide adoption.
• Customer: With developer-focused products, individual developers discover, evaluate, and purchase your product directly.

Your developer tool might attract champion developers at startups where individual engineers drive adoption, while facing consultant developers at enterprises where business roles lead purchasing decisions.

Here’s where traditional marketing funnels break down — these developer roles don’t follow a linear progression through awareness, consideration, and decision stages. A consultant developer may have deep technical knowledge of your product but little to no purchase intent, as they’re not the decision-maker. 

Along the same lines, an implementer developer could be highly engaged with your documentation and tutorials, even if they’ve never seen your marketing website. Meanwhile, a champion developer might skip your carefully crafted nurture sequences entirely and jump directly from first awareness to internal advocacy.

Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey confirms what the continuum suggests: 62% of developers influence technology purchases. This means developers aren’t just implementers — they’re consultants who evaluate solutions and champions who drive adoption.

The breakdown shows senior executives (99%), engineering managers (87%), and product managers (77%) have the most decision-making power, but individual contributors still matter — only 38% report little or no influence.

But here’s the problem. Evaluations change hands throughout the buying process, so your content might be consumed by a technical champion one week and a business decision-maker the next. Your marketing can’t just translate between audiences — it needs to operate at different depths of technical detail simultaneously.

Identify Your Implementation Depth

Every piece of technical marketing content should know its primary audience, but also be aware of who else it could be speaking to — and convincing. A champion developer researches solutions, which they’ll share with their boss. A product manager reviews your technical capabilities before asking engineers to implement it. A CTO may build a case for engineering leadership. 

Implementation depth means creating content at multiple levels of technical detail. Each audience can access the depth they need. They can also easily find more or less detailed versions of the same information, which they’ll share with their counterparts.

Implementation depth maps to the questions different audiences prioritize during technical evaluations:

• What’s happening? Current problems, workflows, or improvement opportunities
• Why? Business drivers, cost of inaction, and strategic value
• What’s possible? Features, approaches, competitive alternatives, and capability matching
• How? Practical guides, technical instructions, and hands-on enablement
• What’s beyond? Advanced use cases, troubleshooting, scaling challenges, and production scenarios

Each level serves a different audience and corresponds to a distinct decision-making stage. The real power comes from connecting them. Let readers move between levels and collaborate with others whose needs differ.

Cloud platform Twilio is a master of depth transitions. Have a look at their user verification product page.

Business audiences get the context and capabilities they need up front. Technical evaluators can explore ‘how it works’ and ‘view demo’ to understand implementation approaches. Developers ready to build find actual code and quickstart documentation links. 

The page serves as a resource for CTOs researching solutions, developers evaluating technical fit, and implementers building a proof of concept — all from the same starting point, but leading to varying levels of depth.

To bring implementation depths into your own work, identify which of the five questions a piece of existing content primarily answers. Then consider what readers would need at one level higher (a broader context) and one level deeper (more technical detail). Look for opportunities to create those adjacent pieces or add clear bridges to existing content that serves those depths.

Build a Technical Content Strategy Beyond the Marketing Funnel

Adopting a technical product is often a complex journey. Developers play different roles, and non-developers are involved, too. The same pain point can inspire one type of conversation between developers and their managers, but an entirely different one between an executive and their technical teams. 

Content strategies must go beyond traditional funnels to reflect and support how technical decisions are actually made.

Ready to build a content strategy to match this reality? EveryDeveloper brings an outside perspective to help developer tool companies navigate these audience complexities. We identify content gaps across implementation depths and create content architectures that support real technical buying processes. 
If you’re struggling with content that doesn’t convert or audiences that don’t engage, consider a partnership with EveryDeveloper. We’ll help you expand your content strategy across audiences, roles, and implementation depths.