In our latest installment of interview series with the leaders in developer marketing, we talked to Grace Francisco, VP of Developer Relations at Roblox. Grace shared with us her experiences building developer relations programs, the challenges her team encounters and how they measure success.

Developer Marketing – what is it, why is it important, how to develop it successfully? We’ve interviewed Scott Apeland who leads the Developer Program at Intel to share with us what it takes to succeed in this rapidly expanding field. This interview is part of our Under the Hood of Developer Marketing series where we ask leading practitioners what Developer Marketing and Developer relations mean to them, what they do to make it happen, and how they measure success.

We launch this series on Under the Hood of Developer Marketing with an interview with Adam Fitzgerald, who’s responsible for Developer Marketing at Amazon Web Services . In this series we interview leading practitioners in the Developer Marketing and Developer Relations field to find what this relatively new discipline means to them, how they execute, and how they measure success.

One of the most notable transformations over the past 5 years has been the pauper-to-prince of the developer as a buying center within a company. […] As software infiltrates every part of our economy, [developers are now] the lead innovators and they’re the lead buyers in companies. What we see are many of our startup companies now deliberately selling to developers as the first wedge point into an organisation. [Developers] all very much have opinions and buying potential.