Building a Dev Content Strategy that survives Monday

With AI making it easier than ever to publish anything we're all drowning in content and a lot of the time it's noise. Additionally, developers, more than most audiences, can smell 'slop' a mile away, and once you've lost their trust, you don't win it back with a louder headline. So our job in DevRel isn't to add to the pile. It's to earn enough trust that when we do publish, developers actually stop and read. Which leaves the question:

How do we build a content strategy that earns developers' trust?

That's exactly what I had to ask myself when I took over the developer content strategy for my Developer Advocacy team at Amazon. And as the saying goes, nothing good in life is easy 😂. It wasn't just about writing quality content. The issue was that our developer audience is enormous: multiple Appstores (, and

With the sources named, I can look at any sprint's backlog and quickly check we're covering the ground. If any of those sources are quiet, that's worth a conversation before we create anything else.

Step 2: Pick the right format for each idea

Once we had a list of themes, the next call was to figure out what shape each one should take. This is where teams usually reach for their favourite format by default (we're a video team, we like blogs, someone loves workshops), and I wanted to stop doing that.

So the first thing I did was write down every format we can make, roughly how long each takes, where it gets published, and who it's really for.

How we decide what to create

Once every theme has a source, a format, and an activation stage, deciding what to prioritise stops being a vibes exercise. What we're left with is a well-curated backlog with a good spread across sources, formats, and journey stages, a lot less overwhelming than the pile I started with. And when a new idea lands, it goes through the same three passes. Anything that clears all three joins the backlog and gets assigned out during sprints. But ultimately it gives me a defensible answer for every stakeholder in the room - Product, marketing, my team, and the developers themselves.

And on the note of Voice of the Developer, if there's anything you've been hoping we'd cover on Amazon devices, drop it in the comments and I'll add it to the backlog 😉.