Have a great developer portal but it’s not gaining much traction? The team at developer.tomtom will share their experiences as to how they revamped their developer portal and turned it into a multiple time award winner by enhancing the UX and including the developers in the conversation! What do you do when your API portfolio grows in size and complexity? How do you keep your product portfolio logical for the technical profiles while keeping it simple for the business users? In this talk, the team behind developer.tomtom.com will explain how they completely revamped their developer portal to improve the product experience for different user profiles; sharing best practices and lessons learned around persona research, usability testing, use cases and product positioning.

1. Louis Debatte-Monroy

2. Source: Evans Data Corporation, 2019

3. Mary Thengvall, The business value of developer relations, Apress

6. Onaverage6.3peopleinvolvedinB2Bpurchasing

8. Confidential © 2019 TomTom
Personas are:
1. Stereotypes – but specific to your business and industry!
2. A great way to explain your audience to non-developers
3. A tool to align teams on a common understanding of who you are building for
4. Qualitative, not quantitative ≠ market segments
5. A never finished exercise!

9. A day in the life of…
Confidential © 2019 TomTom
• Basic portrait: name, age, gender, location they live and
work, family situation
• Professional attributes: job title, years of experience, type
of company they work for, decision power
• Likes and dislikes: at work and outside of work
• Goals and fears: what motivates them? What are they
afraid of or wanting to avoid? What are they trying to
achieve?
• Personality: extravert? Introvert? Detail oriented? Quick
and dirty? Self-learner? Professional? Curious? Focused?
Polyvalent? Specialist?

10. Confidential © 2019 TomTom
1. Plenty of canvases & templates available
2. Start with your own stereotypes, use your intuition and experience
3. Make it a team exercise. Use the Devs in your company as inspiration.
4. No right or wrong: avoid the Imposter Syndrome
5. Observe, observe, observe: their posts; their emails; their names; their locations;
their behavior, what they do on week-ends, where they hang out, their job titles

11. Confidential © 2019 TomTom
AN INTERNAL TOOL WITH AN EXTERNAL IMPACT
1. Build a deck introducing them and share it with every team you work with
2. Put posters on your office walls with your personas
3. Refer to them everyday, in every conversation, as if they were a friend
4. Build content with personas in mind! Always mention them in:
• Marketing briefings
• Web journeys and UX
• Product development
• PR briefings
• Pricing
From “Developers want…” to “What would Pam think of this”?

13. DeeJay the Hacker Bartosz the Engineer Davin the Founder Pam the PM

14. Confidential © 2019 TomTom
Simplified product overview
for Pam the PM
Exhaustive documentation
for Bartosz the Engineer

15. Is this a good company to work with?
Confidential © 2019 TomTom
• Focus on simplicity
• Credibility with brands
• High level descriptions
• Focus on visuals, demos
• No technical details, non
exhaustive

16. What’s under the hood of this tech?
Confidential © 2019 TomTom
• Focus on exhaustivity
• As detailed as possible
• Logical structure, consistency
• No visuals, gimmicks or distractions

17. Is this worth my time? What can I expect from this API?
Confidential © 2019 TomTom
• A convenient tool to test APIs with no
account, API key or strings attached
• Try different parameters and review
the response
• Great for personas that are curious or
have little time to invest

18. What’s the quickest way to build this?
Confidential © 2019 TomTom
• Examples of actual implementation of
your APIs
• Interactive, shows the most popular
use cases
• Offers code samples to copy-paste
• Links to popular tools like CodePen or
GitHub

21. DeeJay the Hacker Bartosz the Engineer Davin the Founder Pam the PM

22. You know you are on the right track when:
Confidential © 2019 TomTom
• Your colleagues refer to your personas in every day life
• You read a piece of content and immediately see who it was written for
• You meet a user and immediately think “She’s a classic [persona]”
• You notice some of the behaviors you had “predicted” in your personas