Have you seen commercials where cars park themselves? Perhaps you even have a car like this.

When my kids learn to drive, I’m not sure they’ll even need to know how to parallel park. They haven’t had to learn cursive writing, so perhaps this will be just another vestigial skill.

Here’s how the Oregon Driver Manual shows parallel parking:

When driving forward, turning the wheel right makes the car goes right. In reverse, the front of the car goes left.

For experienced drivers, parallel parking feels natural. It’s mind-bending to new drivers.

To parallel park correctly, you have to turn the wheel in what feels like the “wrong” direction. Want to get that front end to swing left? Turn the wheel right.

It’s like watching yourself on a TV monitor. You point to the right and your image points to the left. The hardest part about doing the weather on the nightly news has got to be knowing which hand to motion where. Until you get used to it, you’ll be wrong every time.

This mirror-image needs to do the opposite shows up when you market to developers, too.

And once you get used to it, it will be as natural as parallel parking or the meteorologist pointing to the right spot on the map.

Instead of immediately talking about your product, you need to turn the wheel in the opposite direction.

Focus on developer problems or technical education.

When you explore the challenges developers face, you create a natural path that leads to your solution. At first, it will feel counter-intuitive. Eventually it will be like you have the dev engagement equivalent of a fancy self-parking vehicle.

Of course, if you or your team want to figure out the real problems developers face, ​we’re here to help​.

Let’s chat about steering your message in the right direction—even if it means turning the wheel the other way first.