On-Demand Webinar: How Developer Education Can Give You the Winning Edge

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Free trials can get developers into your product, but adoption happens when you teach them the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’ of your product.

Before investing in a tool, developers want to know the following::

1) Does it solve my problem?

2) Is it worth my time?

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Instead of free trials, maximize product discovery by prioritizing education. Empowering your customers with knowledge before they commit to purchasing means more informed and satisfied buyers.

Want to know what sets winning developer education initiatives apart? 

Watch our on-demand webinar led by Tj Randall, Chief Customer Officer of Instruqt, as he guides you through the emerging developer education landscape.
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✅ Discover real-life examples and success stories from industry leaders like MongoDB, Aqua Security, Codefresh, and Solo.io.
✅ Gain valuable insights and strategies on leveraging developer education to increase demand and fill the sales pipeline.

In 45 minutes, you’ll learn:

• How developer education transforms the marketing funnel 
• Developer education examples from MongoDB, Aqua Security, Codefresh and Solo.io
• Discover the tried and tested strategies to scale your developer education experience
• How to create compelling content that developers will love and keep coming back for more
• And what success looks like
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Below is a transcript from the webinar:

I'm TJ Randall I'm the Chief Customer Officer here at Instruqt. My background is in DevOps technology in the Enterprise level, both in the healthcare and insurance sectors. Currently, I run the Customer Success team here at Instruqt I've actually been a user of Instruqt since 2019. We used it in our practice to basically move and train and educate users how to transform their practices, whether it was CI CD whether it was release orchestration into a more modern DevOps experience so we had a lot of success with Instruqt and one of the things I always like to say is for customer success we get to do this for real so I get very passionate about these conversations because this is the day-to-day job around developer education.

So for the next 45 minutes, we're going to look at three topics of developer education that are important. I think for the folks here, we understand this is near and dear to your heart what can we learn from some companies that have done it successfully that are actually actively doing this and we want to give some practical advice on how you can either launch or improve your developer education program and just to give you an idea of the scale of this, at Instruqt we have a significant base of customers who are focused on this topic, so the one thing I always say the benefit of my role is that I get to see a lot of great examples of developer education. I'm always happy to talk about that, and please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly if you'd like to have a further conversation.

Why Is Developer Education Important

First and foremost, why is developer education important? This stat was published in 2019, and I would bet that this statistic has increased where more and more sales opportunities are lost as a direct result of developer influence. We know that developer is the person we're focusing on in terms of our sales cycles and our education and understanding that developer is so important and I really believe that. Having a proper education approach and having the right content will really engage them, which turns this statistic around, and just to make sure we're all on the same page, in terms of that mythical developer that we're talking about, what does that look like, what's the day-to-day look like? With developers, it’s generally very busy. Lots of deadlines. Lots of demands, and I think a lot of times people forget that developers tend to be measured by productive output kind of like the manufacturing line approach to things, and it's not just new. 

Concepts

Concepts can be new features, it can be managing existing code bases, it can be upgrading systems so a lot of different demands and a lot of different context switching throughout the days and weeks so sales calls as we know they're pretty much a distraction to our friends and the other persona aspect of the person I think that really comes through when you're talking to developers is they tend to be more skeptical. The kind of we've seen it all before mindset, they kind of want to analyze things, they want time to think about things, and how to apply what they're trying to solve and as we know, the developer they prefer to build their own tools and I think contextually this makes sense simply because you understand your environment you understand your problems so you think okay how can I solve this with my own build and the reality of the matter is they are a strong influence on our economic buyers so obviously getting the developer focused on our solutions getting them to help understand like how can this help solve the problems that you're encountering.

Applying Developer Education to Your Sales Cycle

It's a pretty important thing that we want to make sure we focus on, and one thing I just wanted to kind of talk about here is, I think at the end of the day, if you look at your typical sales cycle, it's kind of like that middle line. People historically have thought about it as 1) you fill the top of the funnel 2) you book your meeting 3) you do your demo 4)you get your POC 5) we move to quote and legal enclosed.

But as we're finding more and more as that developer's voice grows, what that really means is there's another leg in your sales cycle whether we talk about that in terms of a community, an engagement model, whether it's a freemium, try before you buy model. Or even if you're just a true product-leg growth company, you really are actually opening up another leg that your teams need to be aware of. 

Your developer education becomes even more important when you have a sales model that looks like this because even if you're in a traditional sales cycle where your marketing is nurturing those folks, as they drop out of your sales cycle, educating those folks when they're in the nurture cycle is just as important as supporting them when they're actually trying out your product.

Leverage Content Across Use Cases

One of the things that we're going to talk about is how you can leverage content across the different use cases for that as well and at Instruqt one of the things I like to talk a lot about is we are all about learn by doing.

If you haven't heard that story before you can go on YouTube we started out with Hashicorp and a consulting engagement where we actually delivered Instruqt interaction through an arcade machine and I can tell you we still use those arcade machines today! 

Here's KubeCon Amsterdam and the developers actually really love this concept so they're a little tough to move around but once you're set up you can see at the booth imagine that kind of engagement where you're you're seeing that persona that developer mindset that's kind of playful it's kind of curious like what's this all about then you put our arcade console around that that that's a really fun experience.

But at the end of the day, the message, of course, is to learn by doing hands-on. How do I get involved with your solution and how do I interact with it I think the key here is to really make it easy to showcase your value because, as we know for a developer, especially scenes not believing, and I think we've all learned that just a front-end demo that's not going to get you to closed one. Okay, fine, so really, it's that hands-on experience with tooling that the developer that's where they're going to form their opinions, that's where they're going to analyze how you and your solution play into the problem stack that they're working through. Because developers are adverse to high-pressure sales tactics and things like that they're more of the leave me alone and let me let me load it up and figure it out myself.

Client Examples

That's where that kind of Hands-on showcasing your value is just critical to making sure you're successful because, again, developers make great champions they're the ones that will turn around to your economic buyer and say we walked through this solution, and I think this will really help us as we're trying to solve what more can you ask for when you're trying to showcase your value. 

So what can we learn from companies that are doing this successfully so we'll walk through some Instruqt customers and again. I'm mindful of time don't hesitate to ask questions if you have them. 

We'll start with Hashicorp. Their learned developer site attracts millions of people and it's actually it's incredible because what Hashicorp has been able to do is the thing the concepts that we're talking about today showcasing their value through Hands-On interaction it's incredible you can go to their site you sign up as a Hashicorp developer you can go through their different tracks and really I think it's one of the things. 

That I like an awful lot about that is there's the focus on product if that's the way that you're kind of evaluating and thinking about things there's also a bit of the persona in there as well so you can say like okay I'm developing and I need terraform involved what would that look like to combine those concepts so they do a really good job of basically presenting material in a way that's very easy easy to conse as well as very easy to evaluate.

 MongoDB if you haven't heard this story there's actually another webinar that we did recently with MongoDB but one of the things that to me what great looks like here is one of the things has done is they understand that you have to meet your audience at different points right you have to understand like how do they like to consume content and learn and so one of the things I think that's great about what Mongo's done is they include different aspects in which to learn similar information so you can either watch videos with language subtitles you can go through Instructional content like your documentation pages you have your Hands-On lab to reinforce what you're learning and you have knowledge checks as you go through so there's that nice feedback loop as well. 

I think this learning experience is wonderful because if you're coming here, you can learn the way you want to learn, and you can also learn an awful lot of really significant amount of content that applies to what you're trying to solve Aqua security this is awful fun. 

Academy, that's the Aqua Academy that they built up, and I think a great feature to point out here is you leveraging that persona-based approach. If you're an administrator trying to implement Aqua security, there's a series of tracks that will really walk you through the granular details of what you need to do, and this is nice because it separates you from a different Persona, which maybe you're a developer. You're modernizing your DevOps stack, and you'll be leveraging Aqua security as part of your CICD implementation that different persona same tooling.

Another thing that Aqua does is they overlap that content so you can get some administrator. without having to go deep diving all the way through if you're a developer and vice versa but I really think that Aqua does a great job of focusing on how to implement solutions, how do I run and be successful with the solution code fresh this is an amazing certification story.

They really are focused on how do I create something that just is just world-class in terms of certification courses, so they built a GitOps fundamental certification course, which is quite fun I encourage you to take it and again leverage that hands-on approach to say it's not just reading it's not just being able to answer some questions you have to go to the command line and prove that, but I can tell you from a developer education and a developer engagement approach this is really critical they've really thought through like if my app developers coming and they want to get certified how can we best do that how can we best engage them and their feedback proves that they get some really amazing feedback. 

In terms of just what they're going to market with Broadcom they actually I'd like to call this one out because I've never seen anything quite like this using Instruqt they've actually built tracks on the Mainframe. Who would have thought right but I can tell you they did two things that are actually quite remarkable one they're running Instruqt on the top of the Mainframe. 

So you're getting a hands-on sandbox learning environment that you can go ahead and dive into and and learn interactively with as well as they've created a fun and interactive way to learn through discovery. They've built a series of tracks which are escape rooms so you talk about like engaging a developer in terms of experience you get to drop into an escape room and in order to get out you have to work through a series of challenges. It's a quite fun way to really engage with people and how they want to learn Datadog has been really doing amazing things in terms of their courses.

One of the things I like to call out here and something for you to think about when they do developer education they actually provide a fully functional trial account with access after the training. They focus on the learning they have a series of tracks with challenges you will work through those you get that nice feedback they do checks to make sure that you're actually successful in terms of what you're learning and then after that once you're done with your training you actually can then continue your work in a real environment. 

The developer experience from a sales cycle perspective you can see that's really beneficial that keeps the learning going afterthe training event and I know this works well for them whether they're doing workshops or webinars or things like that the other thing is that data does quite well is that persona-based learning and really understanding who are the personas that are using my product and then how can I build engaging content for other personas that are curious and learning how to use the tools.

SoloIO academy this is actually an amazing example of how they use training content for different aspects of their cycle so whether they're using that content for live workshops they use the same content for demos they also have self-paced learning all of those different ways in which to approach the learners. This is actually a fun screenshot from the workshop they ran at Kubecon Valencia where they had a room full of developers.  The whole workshop was literally just developers working through examples through a hands-on mechanism and the Instructor being able to respond to those quickly. But you can imagine even in a pre-sale cycles, you're in a workshop at an event that's a pretty great way to sell and showcase your value so if you think about what Solo.IO is doing with their Academy this is a great example of meeting developers where they are and especially making sure that your content is applicable across different aspects of what you're trying to sho.

Let's look at what does great developer education look like. I grabbed this from the Davata state of development report this is 2019 and again I would bet that these these nubers have gone up but one thing I thought was actually really interesting about this is if you look on that kind of left-hand side the things that we've been talking about so far that kind of hands-on that really learn by doing making sure that they have different ways to engage with the content is is really it shows out here whether it's tutorials or blog posts short articles of videos developers want to engage with you. They want to engage with you in a way where they can see that themselves and probably not be led through the problems and one thing that we'll be talking about is is a great way to do that and one thing that we'd like to use a lot ourselves is that Tell Show Do Apply framework.

I know myself I use this as well first and foremost is developer experience so even upskilling and new Skilling your developers so imagine now if you're taking your educational content that you have in a public-facing way for your prospects and customers and you're leveraging some of that content as well for upskilling your own developers making them more productive faster reducing the amount of time that your existing team has to be dedicated to training.

I think you can start to see your educational content in terms of how you form and create that distribute it can be used across different use cases another one that I'm seeing and I know I use this an awful lot was for our partners right we want our partners at the end of the day to implement solutions just like we would well isn't that a lot like training one of your own employees so all of a sudden now your partners they need to understand what your DevRel what does that look like what does your marketing team presenting to the world so your partners would actually start to go through a training program. 

That includes the groups that we're talking about today and that even includes even more so I know for it this one's near and dear to my heart back from my devops days is IT at the end of the day they're trying to understand if we like the solution we like we believe in it we think this is going to help us that really that next step that you're going to get your  hampions to really  champion for you is how do I successfully run and manage the solution how do I implement it in a way that'll be successful. 

I think again if you're seeing the overlap that I'm speaking to that content for your IT teams is just as important for your partners, and probably just as important for your developers, and of course training and services getting teams successful in the solution and learning the how and why so this kind of maps out the areas in which you're building content for as a developer education program.

Let me show you example what this can look like. I'm taking out the customer name for this but the idea here is that this customer is using Instruqt training content for not just their developers but also for partners and services. This is a little bit of they have a two-week training program this is what it looks like right out of the gate. They've built some developer education content to really validate the skills that you may need this is important right so whether it's a developer in one of your own staff whether it's a developer during a pre-sale cycle that you're actually just starting to work with the customer it's important to understand are they are they going to have the skills needed can you imagine the sales cycle where we say okay Mr customer we're getting ready for the POC one of the things I'd like you to do is take a couple tracks learning tracksto make sure you're ready to to basically work through the problems of the POC that actually would go a long way to say okay we have the right people the right skills on board.

Now we're going to showcase value so this customer then takes that even deeper and for the first week they really focus on that kind of developer Persona like if I'm a technical person what are my skills that I need and not just kind of the vanilla version of that it's not just Java 101 it's like how do we do Java in our organization and then they've actually built a developer project for this and as I've said this is across multiple use cases so now they have a developer project for onboarding their own people they use that same thing for onboarding partners and their services teams and I've seen them use that in a sales cycle as well to basically say okay here's a developer project that you can use as you're going through a POC process and then really you can see the concepts are now starting to build where it's like okay this software solution is really focused on devops and CICD. 

They can basically start to say what is my application stack look like and how do I build on that from there their second week deep diving even more and you can see the tell show do apply framework all through this you can see where they're talking about the skills that are needed they're showcasing those and then they're having that hands-on engagement where you kind of have to prove the proof is in the pudding and then applying that to the real world. It's like when a learner is done with this learning program they're going to be a successful developer or they're going to be a really good partner for you so you can see this approach even just from a two-week engagement perspective of learning you can see how the content is applicable across multiple parts of your business.

I think you can see that the strategy is such that it really goes after the technical skills that would make that developer that technical person successful and just to finish this this concept I think this is important this customer extends that from onboarding as well remember we talked about our operations teamwhere they're gonnathey have to run and manage the solution so building out training content this makes it much easier as you move forward so it's not tribal knowledge. It's like your stack how you've implemented that and again it's content that's applicable so imagine now you have employees that want to upskil.

So you have employees looking for how do I get a new job how do I get promoted or I'm building in a Services Program where I want to make sure that the services team can replicate our success outwards again this is a really smart investment for customers in terms of developer education.I think the portability of it is really important well now it's time for a demo because we've talked an awful lot about that so I'm just going to switch screens here and we're going to start learning an Instruqtor that's interesting. 

A Quick Look at the Instruqt Product

Instruqt focuses on is you want to have multiple ways in which to engage the learner you want to be able to showcase in the telling way of that through documentation and video you want to start to show them that and that's how Instruqt will do that they'll guide you through that and then after that it's all about hands-on. As we go to our next challenge so why Instruqt one of the things that you're going to see here is is we want to make this as self-service as possible so as we go through this you are going to see now we have multiple tabs in which a learner is actually going to interact with our application for this particular challenge they will be installing some code through the terminal they'll be working through a web they can either work in a terminal or an editor and then they can actually run an application within that sandbox.

This is important and I think this just shows the real world implementation of Tell, Show, Do, Apply from here it's just very easy to see how this kind of works we get our environment overview and we can actually start to think about okay if I have to Showcase my value to developer what are the things that they need to be able to do to be successful. So for example let's say we want to have them run some code the nice thing about using Instruqt we can actually run this within a controlled sandbox environment we don't have to worry about them breaking anything and then we can go ahead and then just start to Instruqt them on how different pieces of this work so for our example.

Here you can see that they want to go through a Docker compose file and oftenthis is obviously our test drive one of the things that I think is most I see most of our successful customers doing is it's not just about installing software it'smaybe it's configuring the software so the person understands the concept but then it's taking that to the next level by saying okay let's solve a real world challenge when we're doing that andwe kind of saw some of those examples as we go so we're going to hit skip here just because we'll take this out of screen share to finish and wrap up here.

Instruqt is a browser-based virtual Labs platform for education, developer marketing, and being browser-based that just means that there's nothing to install and what you're getting out of that is you're getting the platform in which you can run your software in a safe secure way but giving your developers and your technical audiences a hands-on experience with your real software.

You want a hands-on experience with your software the other thing that they think is important isas we've been talking through our sales cycle today and our sales concepts is you can see how a sales rep does not required in the early stages we have customers for example that will say I'm not going to talk to a prospect until they've done at least three Instruqt challenges so it's a really actually nice way to be able to say okay Mr. Developer or Mrs. Developer you're excited about our solution here are some Instruqt tracks that we want you to work through once they've worked through that we would update the appropriate CRM to say ‘okay they're ready’ and then the sales people can engage so from a sales perspective, from a go-to-market perspective it's a really nice way in which to basically choose when you want to engage with your audience. Of course it's it's important in terms of the MQL process as well right how do you generate more qualified leads get them Hands-On get them doing get them applying that knowledge and last but not least the reason why we like it so much is developers get to enjoy working with the platform so it's not it's not a fake kind of thing where they just go in and can do a couple screenshot type of works they can actually go in and interact with the software which makes it really successful cool and for yourselves.

Well again I thank you all for your time thank you for joining us today sorry if there was any technical snafus. Hopefully I did it okay solo here and I look forward to seeing you either contact me directly if you want to have further discussions or we'll see you at the next webinar hope you have a great weekend everyone thank you! 

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