NB: This article is based on a talk given by Stacey Kruczek, who, until very recently, was still Senior Global Marketing Leader of Developer Relations at Zebra Technologies.


At the 2022 Developer Marketing Summit in San Francisco, Stacey Kruczek, Director of Developer Relations at Aerospike, talked about her time at Zebra Technologies.

  • Who Zebra Technologies is and what they do,
  • Why Zebra Technologies was in need of a robust developer marketing strategy,
  • The importance of defining different developer personas when implementing your strategy,
  • How Stacey was able to make significant improvements to Zebra’s developer marketing toolbox,
  • What Zebra’s developer marketing toolbox looks like today.

You can read the highlights from Stacey’s presentation below.👇

Who is Zebra Technologies, and what do they do?

I started with Zebra Technologies almost seven years ago now as a Technical Marketing Writer. I was interviewed by the DevRel team for engineers in our specialty printing group, SPG, and a DevRel lead.

They needed somebody to come in and help them tune up their content, work with some of their editing tools, and help them deliver consistent content to their community.

What I thought I was going to be doing on day one quickly evolved into that 30, 60, and 90-day plan that we all have to put together. I was truly ambitious when I put those things together, so it quickly evolved within 30 to 50 days.

When I came into the company, they were merging Zebra Legacy with Motorola. Imagine you're going into Target and you're making a return. We have a mobile device that scans the barcode on your phone. Those are our scanners. They're printing out things or looking for inventory throughout their technology and location services.

So, that's what we started with until we merged with Motorola and their enterprise mobile computing. Now, we've got all these mobile computing devices, so we’re a force to be reckoned with on the hardware side.

Our developer community was really internal and external when I walked in. We started at about 5,000, went up to 7,000 people, and now we're close to 10,000. We just keep going out and gobbling them up.

We're also in the software space and we're definitely making a mark on it in robotics, machine vision, you name it. We're stretched thin in our DevRel team, but it's an exciting time at Zebra because we're expanding so quickly.


When should DevRel report to marketing?
You need to take a holistic approach to persuasive messaging for developers that includes all technical content you publish, whether it’s documentation, blog posts, code examples, SDK, code examples, or API references.


I’ve spent over 25 years in marketing. I've dabbled in technology and some development and databases and things of that nature. It's something that I've been doing throughout my entire career, but I've always been on the marketing side because I'm a creator, a builder, and a strategist, and I love to go in and fix things.

Now, Zebra Technologies as a community and our developer community may not necessarily align strategically to your community, but there are some necessary tools you should adopt when talking to developers.

Whether they be enterprise developers or independent developers, whatever those developer personas are, you need to have certain pieces in your toolbox. It just might be different for each company.

I want you to have an idea of the tools we had when I walked in and then what they are today. In the first 60 days, I had to go out and define our developer personas. That was an interesting ride.

Collaboration is key. I walked into an engineering department as a marketing person. Why is a marketing person working with the engineering team? Collaborating with the marketing, product, sales, and channel teams is key and has been key all along.


Collaborative approach between developer marketing and developer relations
How do you build your developer marketing and developer relations functions? What’s the impact of cross-functional collaboration? What’s the future of this industry?


Then there’s growing awareness and engagement organically. And I'm talking about everything: content, social, you name it. We'll talk a little bit about how I carry a tin cup and go to all the product areas and beg for money to put towards our developer portal and some of our tools.

Understanding the importance has quickly evolved now, and we have the attention of the organization for several reasons.

One of the other things I want you to walk away with is making use of use cases. This is incredibly important. What have you built as a company with developers, ISVs (independent software vendors), or your ISVs and their development teams that you can teach and tell your developer community about?

This has been one of the key components of the content that we're driving to our developer community.


How can developer marketers get the most out of developer communities?
In our State of Developer Marketing 2022 Report, we looked into developer communities to give you a treasure trove of intel you can use in your role. Here’s a sneak peek at what you get when you download your free copy of the report.


Why Zebra Technologies needed a robust developer marketing strategy

So there I was in the hot seat in the first 30 days. And this was fine, I could totally handle it. I quickly learned where all our content was, and it was like this octopus of information.

We had our TechDocs that were being managed somewhere out in New York. Technical documentation, white papers that held a lot of interesting, rich technical content. Then we've also got our blog.

We have a developer advocate team. We have three engineers that work with me directly, but they're mainly print engineers. Then we have the enterprise mobile side of our business. We have engineers there that are developer advocates, but that's only 10-20% of their job. Their job really focuses on their product.

So, it was a bit different in terms of how content was being managed and where we were getting it from. So I had to take all that together, put it in hand, and then decide how there would be an editor-in-chief for this and how we were going to reflect the right voice in our community.

During the first 30 days, it quickly became clear that we could work on so much more, which is why I offered to create a developer strategy. Hence, I'm a developer marketer.

So I was sitting in the sea of engineers and I was challenged with understanding what the developer community needed to be doing. And so, I took the time to evaluate their current toolbox.



There were some things that were working that they were doing as a small team. They had a developer portal that had good information. It wasn't beautiful, but it didn't have to be.

Did it get the developer the information and technical content they needed? Yes. Were we answering their questions in the forums? Yes. Did we have experts that were helping? Yes.

In terms of our developer events, when I walked in they had these monthly dev talk webinars on certain pieces of information for the developer community. And we brought in our product experts, some of our own internal engineers, and our extended dev advocate team to conduct these one-hour webinars.

We had about 50-150 people sign up to these developer talks, and about half of those would actually attend, then they'd watch it on our YouTube playlist. Our mailing list at that time on Mailchimp was about 2,000 people, and within two years I headed it up to 5,000. Today I have it up to 21,000.

We know that dev docs and tech docs are important pieces of information. They told us back then and they're still telling us now that they want this information. There’s still a separate site that’s handled out in New York and I’ve got another team managing it. There’s good information there, but it's disjointed.

Then we have our Developer Kitchens, which involve meetups, workshops, and mini-hacks. But for Zebra, it's unique in that we work really closely with our independent software vendors and our internal teams, and they go out and find the developer teams to bring in.

So we might have new technology or something that we want to teach them, such as how they can build on our mobile devices and use our enterprise browser, which is one of our trademarks. We'll bring in about 20-30 people and give them beer, pizza, and some swag. We’ll then say, “Alright, let's go develop,” and then we create these use cases.


What is a case study in marketing?
A case study is a testimonial outlining your customers’ success with using your product, explaining how your product’s key features led to benefits for your customer such as productivity and through increases and time and cost savings.


We had a social presence on Twitter and LinkedIn which was working but it wasn't great, and the corporate social gods were saying, “We want to know your engagement metrics and your click-through rate. It's about quality, not quantity. That's what I started professing with them in 2018.

We had a Zebra developer community group on the side that worked very well. We had that up until last month when I converted it to what is now a public company page where we're sharing information and cross-promoting. We weren't doing that before.

The thing that really drove me crazy about the socials is that they lived on the social team. So if I wanted to publish a tweet, I had to put together the content, have that team edit it, go through it, and get the stakeholder sign off. Two weeks later, I eventually got a tweet.

The coolest thing about being on that team is that I learned a ton from these engineers, even development. Involve me and I learn. This is what we have to remember when talking to our developer community. It's how they interact with us.


Why developer communities matter
Today, we’re focusing on developer communities. They’re channels or platforms that allow devs to engage in discussions with one another, as well as in conversations with experts. It provides a place for them to thrive and grow as well.