Devtron

Challenge

Summer 2023. Devtron was doing it all.

• Bringing in new venture capital to invest in growth.
• Onboarding a new U.S.-based sales team.
• Making key hires in marketing, DevRel, and account management.
• Moving operations from India to the U.S.
• Angling for key partnerships and technology integrations within the cloud native ecosystem.
• Managing an active and fast-growing open source community.

From a siloed perspective, these efforts were all moving along nicely. New people, deeper sales conversations, more active developer relations.

But when one looked at the motion of the entire business, or dissected how the sales team was talking about Devtron’s solution versus the technical co-founders, the fissures were clear.

There was no consistency in how different units talked about the same platform.

To some, Devtron was a Kubernetes-native Apps Management Platform. To others, it was a cloud native internal developer platform. Some wanted to promote Devtron’s open source foundation heavily, in that it combines many proven projects like Argo CD and KEDA, while others wanted to focus exclusively on what Devtron does above and beyond the existing tech. They lacked agreement on how to talk about pricing and differentiators between the open source project and the paid commercial product.

The co-founders were starting to see how critically they needed to align on what they were building, why, and how to talk about it cohesively. Time to add a messaging project to the TODO list.

Solution

The first big win came during our messaging workshop, which I held after in-depth 1-on-1s with every stakeholder, competitive research, and interviews with external DevOps experts.

After a heartfelt discussion about why the co-founders created their open source project in the first place, we discovered a new strategic alignment that informs everything they do, from product development to sales pitches:

• Leverage open source to make impactful software like Devtron more accessible
• Empathize with their DevOps, platform engineering, and developer audiences through hard-won perspective
• Adapt to new challenges, markets, and ecosystem changes with an insistence on developer experience and wellbeing
• Build trust with the cloud native community by insisting on a higher level of craft in their product

With the pillars of Devtron’s brand story locked in, we moved into the remainder of framework document. We rallied research and guidance on who Devtron talks to and how the product’s features support their differentiated goals. We crafted boilerplate and example messaging that serves as a north star—now, all of Devtron speaks as one.

Perhaps most importantly, Devtron has since leveraged their commitment-driven messaging framework to inform new marketing and sales strategies:

• Fresh website copy from their new VP of Marketing
• A clear pricing page that details exactly what different users can expect
• Concise and compelling boilerplate for jumping into sales calls and VC pitches
• A more precise content strategy based around manager vs. practitioner personas in DevOps and platform engineering

Now, no matter how Devtron adapts next, they have an adaptable framework for driving commitment to their product and their passionate vision for the future of Kubernetes software delivery.

Examples of messaging that generates commitment

• Mission:

  Our application delivery platform accelerates the productivity of developers, DevOps, and platform engineers, improving their wellbeing and enabling them to achieve corporate goals of velocity, efficiency, and risk mitigation.

• Vision:

  To deliver wellbeing to every developer and engineer in the cloud native ecosystem, while enabling them to achieve their technical goals more efficiently.

• From the brand story:

  • We’re relentlessly focused on capabilities and interfaces that elevate DevOps engineers into strategy and leadership—where lasting impact happens.

  • With an open source Devtron, the best practices of DevOps are no longer pay-to-play for the enterprises and Series C unicorns, but for every DevOps engineer who wants to deploy Devtron and immediately see a new path toward strategy and growth—not just as engineers, but as people.

• One-liner boilerplate:

  Devtron is an open source application delivery platform that improves the wellbeing and productivity of developers, DevOps, and platform engineers. With Devtron, DevOps and platform teams elevate the developer experience, shorten release cycles, and stabilize production environments, freeing them to focus their talent on forging a long-lasting competitive advantage.