The Art of Platform Marketing: You’ve Gotta Sell It

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by Lindsey Francy Jun 6, 2023 News
The Art of Platform Marketing: You’ve Gotta Sell It

How do we get people to use our platform?

I get asked this question a lot. Making sure you take a product management approach and build an app platform that developers want to use is a good first step. Good, old-fashioned marketing is often overlooked and misinterpreted by platform teams. Once you have your platform set up, you need to build a full marketing plan to get people to use it. Brand, messaging and positioning are included in this.

What Platform Marketing Does

Product management feedback about your platform is one of the benefits of platform marketing. The last part of advocacy isunderappreciated. You will appreciate feedback from your customers when you are developing in a product mindset. When infrastructure teams tell me that they built a platform for developers but they aren't using it, it's usually because they need to do more platform marketing

Infrastructure people don't like marketing. It is an off-putting word that is only compared to the term enterprise sales rep. It's always good to say that what people dislike is bad, boring and useless marketing. Most of the successful platform teams pay attention to marketing. Many companies start their platform marketing plans on the first day. Marketing is a key part of scaling and sustaining how these organizations improve.

One of the 7 lessons from 7 years of running platforms will be covered in my upcoming talk at PlatformCon. One of the lessons is marketing and advocacy.

Brand

platform teams are often asked if they have a t-shirt yet. Establishing a brand is one of the most important parts of platform marketing. You need to have a name for your platform. The U.S. Air Force and JP Morgan Chase have brands.

Two functions are performed by a brand.

The first thing it does is create an identity and a definition of what your platform is. People use the tools they are given. They are Java developers, Rust developers, Linux administrators, and so on. In this case, your platform, your identity creates attraction to the brand. It creates a certain amount of joy in using the platforms.

A brand can help define what your methodology is. You will need to adapt those methodologies to your organization's unique needs no matter what you do. cafeteria DevOps, where you just pick and choose the practices you want to use, isn't so fond of the methodology's experts. You need to make compromises in order to get better in large organizations.

It is possible to take ownership of the methodology you are putting together with the help of your own name. It's a good way to save time. One executive told me not to use the wordagile when I was on an elevator ride. Someone will complain that you are doing it wrong and that you are not doing real Agile. You get stuck in the mentality of a small-differences black hole instead of getting on with the work.

The Book

You will need a manual, training, documentation, and the usual three ring binder material. Writing up the thinking behind the brand is something you will want to do. Distribute your intentions, goals, and principles. This is more useful than vision and strategy.

It is a good idea to look at examples for inspiration. The UK Digital Service has a lot of design principles. You can read about how we think about software in our FAQ and books.

Documentation of your thinking will be important as you scale your platform to hundreds, then thousands of developers. The culture that your platform is built to support is documented more than just tech documentation. The book will help the platform team remember the points of the platform. To get the organization focused on building well-designed software, using lean design techniques, deploy weekly, etc.

Platform Advocacy

The successful platform teams have very active platform advocacy. Having at least one person working full time to just talk with, work with and listen to the people who use your platforms is what this means. Vendors and cloud providers understand the role ofdeveloper advocate. We love talking about our craft. Asking us will allow you to find out how it is done.

One platform advocate who visits with developer teams throughout your organization listening to what they do, teaching them how to use the platform and associated methodologies and listening to their feedback is likely to be the first thing you do. The advocate is a spreader of your platform. The platform team gets feedback from developers and other people. The platform team and platform users are advocated for by them.

You will add more advocates as your platform scales. You could have a team of platform advocates. You would expect an advocate to help with the many community management functions provided by the Cloud Foundry platform team at Mercedes-Benz.

The advocacy team holds quarterly internal conferences. These are actual, in-person conferences that take place in different regions and offices with an online component. At these conferences, your platform team and executive sponsors talk a bit about the platform, but most of the time you get your customers to talk about the projects they have worked on. This is used for training and marketing.

Word of mouth is the most prized of all marketing treasures. The best way to get developers to use your platform is to have developers tell other developers that it's good.

Start Platform Marketing on Day One

Producing content and documentation, as well as working with product management to understand your customers and go to where they are, are some of the marketing basics that need to be done.

I haven't seen a lot of platform teams that have scaled and sustained their platform without marketing. You need to start thinking about marketing from the beginning, assigning at least one full-time advocate to start that work of creating a brand name and documenting your platform philosophy and principles. Tech marketing is well-understood and you don't need to change it. There is a trick to it.

The other six lessons of scaling and sustaining platforms in large organizations can be found in my full talk at PlatformCon.

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