The Event That Built a Marketing Program

Akamai was an established enterprise infrastructure company whose SaaS products were evaluated, championed, and used daily by developers. Developers were critical decision-makers. Yet Akamai had no formal developer marketing motion, no scaled developer community, and limited visibility with developers relative to its competitors.

I was recruited from Salesforce specifically to build and grow that program from the ground up. OSCON, O'Reilly's open source conference, became the first real proving ground: Akamai's debut modern developer event presence, and the precedent that would shape every developer event that followed.

Launch Akamai's first modern developer event presence in under 30 days.

At the starting line there was no booth, no collateral, no swag, no event template, and a developer marketing function still being defined in real time. The event had to deliver on four fronts simultaneously:

• Engagement that went deeper than badge scans
• Community signups from both current and prospective developers
• Actionable feedback for evangelists, sales, and product
• A repeatable model that could scale to global conferences

There was no internal baseline to work from, so success criteria had to be estimated from historical data. And the audience itself was the hardest part of the equation: developers have finely tuned instincts for detecting when they are being marketed to, and they leave.