Advocacy Mission: What Is It? What Is It Not?
Executive Summary
You sell products to developers. By now, you should be acutely aware of the fact that those very developers are increasingly, if not directly, influencing decisions related to purchasing of software technology, such as cloud platforms, frameworks, and tools. Engaging with developers, and the developer community, is not a nice to have, it is a necessity for survival. Per RedMonk cofounder Stephen O'Grady, author of “The New Kingmakers”, developers are the most important, most valuable, constituency in business today, regardless of industry. Technologists are no longer content to be mere stage players. They are taking an active hand at direction.
With developers’ increased power over what technologies a company will be deploying, your business needs to position itself as a respected and trusted adviser to these developers.
Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP among others have been wrestling with these types of issues for years. Microsoft has