What does selling to platform engineering teams mean for developer relations? • businesskinda.com

Startups selling developer tools have seen the pendulum swing in recent years. On the one hand, developers rarely need anyone’s permission to start using their tools, which led to teams within the same organization using vastly different tech stacks. On the other hand, a growing number of companies are trying to limit this chaos at the organizational level.

The latest trend is known as platform engineering and is epitomized by platform engineering teams. In conversation with businesskinda.com, Boldstart companies partner Shomik Ghosh described these as “groups within typically larger organizations that are given the role of improving the developer experience for other developers in the organization.”


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The role of platform engineering teams includes coming up with their own tools and documentation, as well as making core tooling purchase decisions for developers to use across their organization.

For dev-centric startups, this poses a question: How do you sell your product to platform engineering teams?

We asked this and more of three people with deep knowledge of this space: startup founder Nora JonesCEO on Jeli; Armon DadgarCEO and co-founder of NASDAQ public company HashiCorp; and draft.dev Director Charles Hughes, an expert in content marketing for developers. Let’s dive in.

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