A Practical Guide to Developer Journey Analysis

Once you have a clear understanding of your target developer personas, it’s time to focus on your developer journey and experience. Understanding your developer journey is absolutely critical for building products developers love and sustaining your developer motion. While working with tens of thousands of developers across different industries and regions, I’ve developed a systematic approach to analyzing and improving the developer experience, building on the great work of others in the field such as Caroline Lewko and James Parton at The DevRel Agency.

The Foundation: What makes a developer journey

A developer journey maps out every interaction a developer has with your product, from initial discovery through to becoming an active user and advocate. This journey isn’t linear or one-size-fits-all. A senior engineer at an enterprise company follows a very different path than an independent developer building a side project.

The journey typically involves four main phases:

  1. Discovery: In order to use your product or platform, developers must first learn about your it through web properties, social media, or community discussions.
  2. Evaluation: Developers will then evaluate your product to determine if it meets their needs. This is often done through a trial, demo, or quickstart. Think of this phase as the “hello world” test.
  3. Learning & Building: Once a developer has built a proof-of-concept or simple example, they will then build a more complex integration, referring to docs or educational resources along the way. I sometimes see “learning” and “building” as two separate phases, but I think they are often too intertwined to separate.
  4. Scaling: Once a developer has built a more complex integration, they will then scale their usage of your product and put it into production. This is the phase where they will start to become an active user and often involves more complex use cases, troubleshooting, and support. A good or bad experience here has long-reaching ramifications, creating a supporter or detractor for years.

Starting your analysis

Before diving into journey improvements, take stock of your current state. Begin by documenting every developer touchpoint:

For each touchpoint, record:

Common pitfalls to avoid

Through my experience leading developer relations at Auth0, Okta, and Writer, I’ve seen teams make several common mistakes in journey analysis:

  1. Focusing too heavily on discovery channels while neglecting documentation and examples
  2. Assuming all developers follow the same path or have the same level of context on your product as your own engineers
  3. Not accounting for different experience levels and learning styles (for example, neglecting either beginner or more advanced resources)
  4. Overlooking the importance of community support
  5. Trying to fix everything at once instead of prioritizing key friction points

Making improvements that matter

Once you’ve mapped your current journey, focus improvements on areas with the highest impact. At Auth0, we found that investing in these areas yielded the strongest results:

  1. Clear getting started guides for different languages and frameworks
  2. Deep dive tutorials for more complex use cases
  3. Interactive learning experiences
  4. Active community spaces for peer support
  5. Regular feedback loops with users

Measuring success

Track both quantitative and qualitative metrics:

The most valuable insights often come from direct developer feedback. Schedule regular interviews with developers at different stages of their journey to understand their experiences firsthand.

Building your action plan

Start with these concrete steps:

  1. Document your current developer touchpoints
  2. Identify your biggest friction points through analytics and user feedback
  3. Create developer personas to understand different journey paths
  4. Prioritize improvements based on impact and effort
  5. Establish clear metrics for measuring success
  6. Set up regular check-ins with your developer community

Remember that this is an ongoing process. Your developer journey should evolve as your product grows and your developer community expands.

I’d love to hear about your experiences analyzing developer journeys. What challenges have you faced? What improvements have made the biggest impact?

It’s time for the final piece of the developer motion puzzle: building your developer marketing plan.

Project list gathering dust? 👀

Drop me a line below so I can send you the Tiny Experiments framework and worksheet. You'll also join over 2100 other devs and dev advocates on the Developer Microskills newsletter.