What does selling to platform engineering teams mean for developer relations? • TechCrunch

Startups selling dev tools over the last few years have seen the pendulum swing. On one hand, developers rarely need anyone’s permission to start using their tools, which resulted in teams within the same organization using wildly different tech stacks. On the other, a growing number of companies are attempting to limit this chaos at the organizational level.

The latter trend is known as platform engineering and is embodied by platform engineering teams. Talking to TechCrunch, Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh described these as “groups within typically larger organizations that are given the role to improve 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 but also making buying decisions on core tooling that developers across their entire organization will be able to use.

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

We asked this and more to three people with deep knowledge of this space: startup founder Nora Jones, CEO at Jeli; Armon Dadgar, CEO and co-founder of NASDAQ-listed company HashiCorp; and Draft.dev CEO Karl Hughes, a developer content marketing expert. Let’s dive in.

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