Designing a scalable, community led developer support model
Learn how to build a sustainable developer support strategy that grows with your product without scaling your team proportionally.
As 2023 winds to a close, I’m wrapping up a project where the client wanted to establish a community support model that would scale as their product adoption grew. As a PLG driven company designed for developers, it was important to the client that developer experience didn’t suffer as the community grew. Further, with so many companies laser focused on controlling spend through best practices rather than mass layoffs the client needed to rely on more than just their employees.
The table below provides a high level matrix of typical PLG led channels developers engage with when starting with a company’s product. To keep things simple, I’m going to exclude overlaying product phases such as a MVP, open and closed betas, GA etc into the model and focus primarily on key activities.
Obviously there is a lot of detail that goes into building the matrix out, but this should be a great starting point to help companies, especially those in series B-D phases and for organizations who want to keep a nimble, vibrant, supportive developer engagement strategy. My advice is start from the product out: make sure you know what customers are doing in your product and proactively improve that experience. In the end, the best strategy for reducing customer support is to remove as many points of friction as you can so they never become a problem in the first place.