Your Most Insightful Audience Data is Trapped in Silos

Andrew Gordon, Content Strategist

TL;DR:

You’re swimming in developer data…but most of it is locked away in team silos. Here's how to unlock the insight advantage:

• Break the silo cycle: Cross-team syncs and shared tooling turn fragmented feedback into fuel for developer-first messaging.

• Build smarter content, faster: When DevRel, Product, and Marketing co-own insights, you get campaigns rooted in what devs actually want.

Look beyond basic metrics: The real story lives in GitHub PRs, support tickets, and Discord chats, not just analytics dashboards.

Developer Marketing is Fueled by Data, But Are You Looking in the Right Places?

The science behind developer marketing has always come from culling developer insight. Surveys, focus groups, user tests, and interviews (with stakeholders and SMEs) create a framework for building developer marketing campaigns. Combining this with traditional analytics, such as clicks, bounce rates, and page views, leads to the sketch of what you think your developer audience needs and cares about, and ultimately informs the type of content your marketing team produces.

A more insightful litmus test for how developers feel about your tool, platform, and/or developer resources might not be so easy for your marketing team to find. Insights such as GitHub pull requests, support tickets, frequent topics on Discord, Slack, and Reddit threads, and conversations between the DevRel team and real developers tell the real story. This data and insight reveal what developers are doing, what they like, what they’d like to see, and how they’re solving problems.

However, marketing content producers do not often have access to (or even know about the existence of) some of the data sources within your organization because access is siloed within departments or disciplines. Your product team traditionally tracks GitHub pull requests, the support team has a record of support tickets, the DevRel team catalogs input direct from developers, your engineering team likely monitors forum activity, and your data analysts are tracking user behavior patterns.

The Real Insights Are Hidden in Cross-Functional Corners

My colleague Nupoor Ranade, Ph. D.’s recently published research underscores the value of “hidden user” insights in the form of GitHub pull requests, Reddit threads, support tickets, Discord conversations, and similar behavioral and forum-driven activity. As her research suggests, your organization is surrounded by meaningful developer feedback.

But the problem isn’t a lack of insight—it’s that your marketing team probably doesn’t have access to this data, and they might not even realize that it exists.

Think about the compelling data that is only readily available to certain groups or teams within your organization:

• GitHub pull requests (Product/Engineering team)

• Support ticket trends (Support team)

• Unfiltered Discord and Slack feedback (DevRel team)

• Forum activity and community discussions (Community or Engineering)

• Behavioral trend data (Data/Analytics team)

These sources reveal what developers are building, struggling with, and asking for—but they often sit in isolated workflows. This fragmentation leaves marketing teams relying too heavily on surface-level analytics.

To truly level up developer engagement, we need a broader view of the developer experience—one that brings qualitative, behavioral, and conversational insight into the content planning process.

DevRel is Feeling the Same Pain

According to the State of Developer Relations Report 2024, 60.7% of DevRel professionals say their biggest challenge is proving impact with data.

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the same pain developer marketers have felt forever. The report advises getting better at cross-functional collaboration and focusing on data that matters to stakeholders, not just vanity metrics. Richer, more meaningful signals can be tracked when these metrics are shared transparently across teams. 

Tactics to Take You From Silos to Shared Strategy

Breaking down these silos doesn’t require a data overhaul. It requires intentional collaboration. Here are three ways forward:

1. Co-Discovery During Campaign Ideation: We’ve seen and even facilitated clients building this into their workflows in the form of pre-campaign working sessions across Marketing, DevRel, Product, and Support. These aren’t status meetings—they’re structured discovery exercises where each group brings their top trends, questions, and observations.

2. Recurring Insight Syncs: Ongoing cross-functional syncs at regular cadences help build a feedback loop between teams. These meetings become a forum for:

   • Spotting new developer trends

   • Validating campaign messaging

   • Sharing frontline questions from real users

3. Shared Tooling and Channels: Whether it’s a shared dashboard, a Slack thread, or a more advanced aggregation platform, tools make insights visible. Options include:

   • Shared Notion or Airtable dashboards for developer questions

   • Slack channels for surfacing support + community themes

   • Platforms like Common Room or Catchy’s own Developer Signal Hub to track sentiment, volume, and engagement across platforms

When you treat these tools as live listening surfaces, they evolve from reporting utilities to content strategy engines.

Why This Matters to Developer Marketers 

When marketing decisions are made in isolation, campaigns tend to lose their edge, drifting away from what developers actually care about. But when those campaigns are built on shared, cross-functional insight, the result is messaging that feels timely, useful, and deeply connected to real developer concerns. Integrating this kind of insight helps teams identify high-intent topics earlier, strengthen alignment between product and positioning, uncover hidden friction points in documentation or onboarding, and craft messaging that resonates seamlessly across channels.

At Catchy, we have been able to successfully impact developer marketing efforts by uncovering some of these otherwise siloed or “hidden” data points on recent client projects:

• Meta Open Source: Developer Signal Hub helped uncover a gap in awareness about Meta’s contributions to open source projects. By synthesizing feedback from Reddit, GitHub, and X, we were able to recommend a strategic shift in messaging that helped better position Meta as a leading open source contributor.

• Slack API: Insights from GitHub, Stack Overflow, and Reddit revealed a growing demand for onboarding support and real-time engagement, which was otherwise not prompting recommendations to amplify community resources and developer-contributed projects.

Unlock the Value Trapped in Your Organization

Your team doesn’t necessarily need more data; they need better insights. Developer behavior, sentiment, and feedback already exist within your organization. The key is getting that information out of functional silos and into your marketing strategy.

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Want help creating insight pipelines that bridge DevRel, Product, and Marketing? Connect with Catchy to get started.