The Developer's Hierarchy of Needs

When establishing a Developer Relations program, it is essential to understand what that product’s developers prioritize. Drawing inspiration from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I formulated the “Developer’s Hierarchy of Needs.” while telling a friend the challenges I was facing. This model presents a clear structure to understand how different requirements are layered, with the foundational ones serving as prerequisites for the subsequent levels.

This became a mental/visual overlay that I would apply over the current state of the business I was in to determine the health of my program at each level. Each quarter, I would focus on initiatives that were the most unhealthy, starting from the lowest levels of the hierarchy and working my way up.

The Model

Much like Maslow’s hierarchy starts with physiological needs, developers’ essentials begin from the base and work upwards.

Product and Platform

At the core, developers demand a dependable product with robust APIs, webhooks, and other essential features that may be specific to your product. Before documentation, tools, or community can have any effect, your product/platform must work, and work well.

At SailPoint, we recognized the need to bolster our API credibility, which led to:

• Forming an API guild with Engineering
• Mandating API guidelines
• Incorporating an API linter and schema validator into our API release process
• Joining product roadmap & planning sessions, and engineering architecture calls regularly

This reinforced commitment paved our way for the next tier.

Context and Content

For developers, comprehensive documentation, API specifications, and guides are crucial. Our DevRel team executed hundreds of pull requests and committed countless enhancements internally to our API specs to get them into shape. We also authored guides and best practices, offering our developers context beyond just the technical inputs and outputs. This focus spanned two quarters, later evolving into a regular facet of our program. Eventually, our program evolved to include video and blog content as well.

Tooling

Optimal tooling, like SDKs and CLIs, fosters ease of integration. However, their efficacy hinges on the right context and content, such as robust documentation or API specifications. With our improved APIs and accompanying guidance, we prioritized tools to expedite developers’ tasks beyond just the docs. We rolled out open-source, MIT-licensed offerings such as:

• SDKs
• CLI
• Company-curated Postman collection
• Example applications
• …and more

Community

A healthy, active developer community is an incredible tool for learning, networking, and recognition. Building upon our becoming-reliable product offerings and tooling, we aimed to cultivate an engaged user community around scalable identity governance solutions. Our community-focused initiatives included:

• Introducing a core community forum
• Hosting our inaugural virtual, developer conference in 2023
• Creating an ambassador program for technical contributors
• and other developer-focused programs

Contribution

At the pinnacle, akin to Maslow’s self-actualization, developers yearn to reciprocate, be it through enhancing the product or leading the community. This engagement not only satisfies their creative instincts but also cements their loyalty to your product. At the time this was written, our community was focused on active contributors, with efforts to further this engagement, including a marketplace aimed at incentivizing customer and partner contributions.

Closing

This hierarchy provided me with a strategic lens to explain our team’s focus at any given point and where we were seeing failures within the business. If you’re discerning your Developer Relations team’s direction, benchmark your product against this hierarchy and start where the issues are the most critical.