If you’re building for developers, you already know this: they don’t just jump in after watching a sales demo or downloading a whitepaper. Adoption takes time – and it looks very different from traditional B2B buyer journeys.
Developers are skeptical, independent, and product-first. They want to poke around, try it out on their own terms, and only stick around if it’s genuinely useful.
In our latest report, The State of Developer Adoption 2025, built together with Instruqt, we explore dev adoption, including how companies drive it, the challenges holding teams back, and, of course, how long does it actually take for a developer to go from “never heard of this product” to “we’re using this in production”?
Teresa Garanhel
Is developer adoption slow?
According to our research, over half of respondents (51.2%) say it takes between one and three months for developers to fully adopt and integrate a new piece of software. Just 22% say the process takes less than a month.
Meanwhile, 20.7% report a longer timeline of three to six months, and for a small group (6.1%), full adoption can take more than six months.
These differences reflect the unique nature of developer decision-making and the technical context in which they operate.
It’s not just about the product. It’s also about complexity, documentation quality, onboarding experience, and the developer’s existing skill set.
Companies that want to shorten time-to-adoption need to think carefully about every stage of the journey: from awareness to integration to long-term engagement.
The developer adoption lifecycle
Developer adoption isn’t a moment, it’s a process that unfolds over time, often behind the scenes and without the signals that marketers or sales teams are used to seeing.
Understanding each stage is crucial to identifying where developers are getting stuck and how you can help them move forward.
Awareness
The first step in the developer adoption lifecycle is awareness, but for developers, this rarely looks like a traditional marketing funnel. Developers discover new tools in ways that are largely organic and peer-driven.
They might come across your product through a blog post, a tweet, a conference talk, or a comment on Reddit. They clock the name, skim the homepage, and mentally file it under “might be useful someday.”
Awareness can happen fast, but trust takes longer. Developers need more than brand recognition, they need a reason to care. If you’re not solving a real, immediate problem, they’re not going to remember you.
More complex products may require multiple touchpoints before a developer even clicks on your website. Awareness is often passive and cumulative, developed over time through exposure, not driven by a single moment of contact.
This is where content, community buzz, and showing up in the right places (GitHub, Dev.to, X, etc.) really matters. You’re laying the groundwork for that “I’ve heard of this – maybe I’ll try it” moment later on.
Evaluation
Once a developer is aware of your product, they enter the evaluation phase. Here, they begin sizing it up to determine whether it's worth trying.
But they’re not doing this by reading brochures or watching sales webinars. Instead, they’re poking around your GitHub repo to check activity, scanning your docs for clarity, and googling for any relevant case studies, community comments, or competitor comparisons.
This is a skeptical, pragmatic phase. Developers want to see evidence that your product is stable, actively maintained, and able to integrate with their current stack.
They’re also trying to understand how much effort it would take to implement – whether in terms of dependencies, learning curve, or migration headaches. The more friction they encounter during this period, the more likely they are to abandon the process entirely.
The timeline for this stage varies widely. If a developer has an urgent problem and your tool looks like a clean solution, they might move quickly.
But if the stakes are higher (say, replacing a core part of their infrastructure) evaluation can stretch into weeks as they quietly compare you with alternatives and assess the risks involved.
Trial and first integration
Once a developer decides your product might be worth using, they move into the trial phase. This is where theory meets practice. They're no longer reading about your product. They’re installing it, integrating it into a test project, calling an API, or running a deployment.
This phase is critical, as it’s where adoption either accelerates or stalls out completely. If your onboarding experience is smooth and your documentation anticipates the developer’s questions, they’ll be more likely to stick with it.
But if they hit dead ends, broken links, vague examples, or unclear setup instructions, they’ll churn before they’ve ever really used your product.
This trial phase is where good developer experience really shines. You want devs to feel that early hit of “oh cool, this just works.”
For lower-friction tools (e.g., logging libraries, analytics SDKs), trial might last just a few hours. For more complex tools (e.g., observability platforms, CI/CD systems), the trial process might take several weeks as the developer gradually pieces together a working implementation.
Commitment
The commitment phase is where developers move from casual trial to meaningful adoption. At this point, they’ve proven the product works and are starting to integrate it into something real; often a production environment or a business-critical workflow.
According to our data, 51.2% of developers fully adopt a product within 1–3 months. This suggests that once a developer sees value, they’re likely to delve deep into it, provided that the experience remains consistent and support is available.
However, the commitment phase can stretch. 20.7% say adoption takes 3–6 months, and 6.1% report timelines longer than that, as we’ve seen above.
These delays are often due to organizational factors: internal approval processes, security audits, procurement paperwork, or the need to align multiple stakeholders before a new tool can be officially supported.
What’s important here is continuity. If your documentation stops at “getting started,” or if your support vanishes once the developer leaves the sandbox, you risk losing them right when they’re about to commit.
Advocacy
Once a developer has adopted your product and seen real value from it, they often become an advocate – especially if the experience has been frictionless, empowering, and well-supported.
They might start sharing your tool with colleagues, writing blog posts about their use case, or answering questions about it on Stack Overflow.
Advocacy typically begins three to six months after initial adoption, once the developer feels confident that your product is stable, valuable, and here to stay.
It’s a lagging indicator, but one of the strongest signs of success. Developers trust each other more than they trust marketing teams, so peer-led advocacy can be your most powerful growth engine, especially in saturated or competitive spaces.
Training and its impact on adoption
One factor that often gets overlooked in developer adoption is hands-on training.
Not all products are plug-and-play, and not all teams come with the same baseline knowledge. Even the most intuitive tools may require some onboarding, particularly when you're working with enterprise teams or products with a steep learning curve.
The State of Developer Adoption 2025 report found that training completion rates vary significantly.
Only 4.9% of organizations reported that all their developers complete training within the expected timeframe. The majority (37.8%) said that 51% to 75% of developers finish on schedule, while 29.2% fell in the 26% to 50% range. At the bottom end, 6.1% of companies admitted that fewer than 25% of their developers complete training on time.
This matters because incomplete training often leads to incomplete adoption. If developers don’t finish the onboarding process, they’re unlikely to get far enough to see the product’s value.
Organizations looking to speed up adoption should revisit how they structure training. Is it overly long or rigid? Does it require full completion before real usage is possible? Are there interactive or hands-on elements to keep learners engaged?
Shorter, modular lessons, hands-on environments, and real-world scenarios can go a long way in keeping developers motivated – and reducing the lag between evaluation and full adoption.
So, how can you speed it up?
While you can’t force developers to adopt faster, you can remove the friction that slows them down. Adoption accelerates when developers feel supported, empowered, and successful, especially early on.
The key is to focus on enablement, not persuasion. Developers don’t need convincing. They need clarity, guidance, and a product that delivers.
Think carefully about how your onboarding flows work, how your documentation answers (or doesn’t answer) real developer questions, and how you can turn training into a value-generating experience, not a checkbox.
In short
The journey from discovery to advocacy may take months. But by removing friction and enabling developers to succeed quickly, you can shorten the timeline, increase retention, and turn users into champions.
And that’s when true adoption happens.
Get your copy of The State of Developer Adoption 2025 Report for an in-depth look into what’s keeping developers from fully adopting your product – and start building experiences that actually work.
