hardScenarioDesignCase StudySeniorStaffLead
Your advocacy team can either build things - an SDK, sample apps, better reference docs - or publish things: posts, talks, videos. Both compete with the product roadmap for the same engineering time. How do you decide the split?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Decide by where developers are dropping out. Build when the blocker is inside the integration and repeats for every developer; publish when the blocker is awareness or a mental model.
Developer relations matters here because the deciding what to build versus what answer has to show the boundary, not just the happy path.
Was this answer helpful?
Likely follow-ups
- You have budget for exactly one SDK and developers arrive in roughly equal numbers from three languages. How do you choose, and what do you tell the other two communities?
- An unofficial community SDK for your API already has real users. Do you adopt it, compete with it, or leave it alone?
- A sample application you shipped eighteen months ago is now the top search result for your API and is subtly out of date. What do you do this week?
- How would your split change in the first month of a public API versus three years in?
Related questions
- Six months after launching an internal developer portal, weekly active usage has plateaued at around forty percent of engineering. How would you go about figuring out why, and what would you actually do about it?hardAlso on developer-experience4 min
- You are prioritising the backlog for a product that has no users yet, so there is no reach or impact data. How do you rank it?hardAlso on prioritisation5 min
- Your DevRel programme reports growing impressions, follower counts and packed conference sessions, but finance is asking what it returns. How would you show whether the work is driving adoption, and how would you defend the budget when you cannot attribute cleanly?hardAlso on developer-relations5 min
- The platform migration has no user-visible benefit. How do you rank it against features customers are asking for?hardAlso on prioritisation5 min