15,000 Developers During a Pandemic: What I Learned at HERE Technologies
In March 2020, every developer conference on our calendar disappeared overnight. I was leading developer relations technical content marketing at HERE Technologies, a location intelligence platform, and suddenly the entire playbook was gone. No booths, no talks, no hallway conversations, no hackathons.
By the end of that year, we had onboarded 15,000 new developers. Here’s how, and what the numbers actually looked like.
The Situation
HERE Technologies provides location APIs and SDKs used by companies building mapping, logistics, and navigation products. When I joined in 2019, developer relations was event-heavy. Conferences, workshops, and in-person hackathons were the primary acquisition channels.
When COVID shut everything down, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting. The platform had ambitious growth targets, and “let’s pause until events come back” wasn’t an option.
I had also recently joined the company to implement a content marketing program designed to drive awareness and adoption of the developer offerings.
The Pivot
We rebuilt the entire developer acquisition strategy around three channels that didn’t require anyone to be in the same room.
Tutorial content at scale. We produced written and video tutorials targeting specific use cases: fleet tracking, store locators, route optimization, delivery logistics. Each tutorial was designed to get a developer from zero to a working prototype in under 30 minutes. The key was specificity. “How to build a delivery route optimizer with HERE APIs” performs better than “Getting started with HERE” because it matches what developers actually search for.
Community engagement. We shifted from hosting events to participating in existing online communities. Stack Overflow, Reddit, Discord servers, and developer forums became the primary touchpoints. Instead of waiting for developers to come to our booth, we went where they already were.
Media and content partnerships. We produced an Open Source Covid map, that required 1 thing, a sign up for a HERE Developer Account. This lead to 100+ media articles through technical content partnerships. These weren’t press releases. They were actual news pieces about Covid, but all contained our Covid Map visualizing in near realtime the data that media audiences craved. In addition to the Covid Map, we embedded branding and a link to the Open Source project to create a map if the viewer wished to. This practical, approach to content marketing got the HERE Developer program infront of millions of eyeballs and a fraction of them were even curious developers. We litterally drove developer traffic to the HERE Developer portal with technical content marketing maps.
The Results
The developers who came through the digital channels were, on average, more qualified than conference leads. They had already read an article and were looking to build, before they ever knew about HERE. The onboarding funnel was more efficient because the content did the pre-qualification work that a booth conversation used to do.
From DevRel to Product: The 2,250x Story
In 2021, I transitioned from developer relations into product management for HERE’s cloud marketplace platform. This is where things got interesting from a business strategy perspective.
The marketplace was serving a narrow vertical with limited growth potential. By applying the same developer-centric thinking to product strategy, we identified adjacent markets that the platform could serve with minimal technical changes. The result was a 2,250x expansion of the serviceable obtainable market.
That number sounds impossible until you understand the math. The original market was deliberately narrow. Expanding it meant repositioning the platform’s value proposition and opening it to categories that had been considered out of scope. The technology didn’t change much. The strategy changed entirely.
This experience shaped how I think about DevRel and product management as complementary disciplines. Developer relations generates the insights about what developers need. Product management turns those insights into platform decisions. When the same person holds both perspectives, the feedback loop tightens dramatically.
What This Taught Me
The pandemic forced a natural experiment that most DevRel teams would never have run voluntarily. It proved three things.
Digital-first developer acquisition can outperform events. Not because events are bad, but because content scales in ways that conference booths cannot. A tutorial published in 2020 is still generating signups today. A conference booth generates leads for three days.
Specificity wins. Developers don’t search for your product name. They search for their problem. Content that matches the problem (“how to track a delivery fleet in real time”) outperforms content that matches your product (“HERE Technologies API tutorial”).
DevRel and product management are the same muscle. The skills that make someone good at developer relations (understanding developer needs, reducing friction, thinking in adoption funnels) are the same skills that make someone good at developer-focused product management. The HERE experience proved that to me firsthand.