I heard him chime in from the back seat of the minivan, this tiny voice calling to me matter-of-factly.

Even though my nephew is grown and a developer himself, it was this message as a youngster still sitting in a car seat that taught me an important lesson in marketing to developers.

When my nephews were elementary age and younger, I watched them several times so my sister and brother-in-law could go on vacation.

Here we are being silly:

I would take them to school, make them dinner, and drive them to all sorts of activities. It was karate one day, and soccer the next. Lots of time at the steering wheel of a minivan, long, long before I owned one myself.

It was on one of these occasions, shuttling between places, that I started looking around the suburbs for a coffee shop. I was tired and needed a caffeinated pick-me-up.

My nephews, meanwhile, were begging me for fast food treats instead of frozen chicken nuggets heated up in the microwave at home. They were pushing for Happy Meals. Me, on the other hand, I was still on the coffee track.

I know what you’re thinking: isn’t there a Starbucks on every corner? I guess there wasn’t one in this city then, or I didn’t know where to find it in these pre-smartphone days.

I was lamenting limited caffeine options when my youngest nephew stated an important fact from the back seat. Yet another pitch for fast food, but this one was different:

“McDonald’s has coffee.”

I wanted coffee. McDonald’s has coffee. Fact! He’d put it in terms that I cared about.

Never mind that once in the drive-through, I would surely add a couple of Happy Meals to that order. He framed it in a way that made me want to pull into that parking lot and join the line of other minivan drivers.

Too often, the features of our products that we mention are the ones we care about, not the ones developers care about.

We want them to sign up for our product. We want them to use our product. We want them to pay us for our product.

But what do they want? They are wandering around the internet looking for something that they need. For them, it’s not coffee, but whatever the problem is, they’re trying to solve it.

Frame your ​message around the problem​ that they have, and they’ll be much more likely to do the things that you want them to do.

And yes, I bought the Happy Meals.