State of
Developer-Tools PMM
2026.
The first practitioner-led survey of how product marketing actually works inside developer-tools companies. Run by Daria Dovzhikova — 12 years inside DevTools at JetBrains, Lightrun, and Odigos.
Methodology pre-published · Survey opens Q1 2026 · Dataset will be free & open
Why this report exists
There is no canonical data source for how product marketing works inside developer-tools companies. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey polls developers — the audience, not the marketers serving them. The Product Marketing Alliance publishes the broadest PMM compensation and craft surveys, but the DevTools subsegment never gets pulled out as a separate cohort. The result is that DevTools founders, PMM hiring managers, and the PMMs themselves are negotiating comp, scoping headcount, and drawing the DevRel boundary with no shared baseline.
The population is small enough to actually survey. DevTools-focused product marketers globally are a cohort of fewer than two thousand people — a population census-able by one practitioner with a survey instrument and a credible enough network to reach it. That is what this report is.
What we're measuring
Eight research questions, pre-published before any data is collected so the design is on the record. Each one is a construct the survey instrument tests — wording may be refined during pilot but the constructs are fixed.
- Question 01
Compensation
Base salary range, equity, bonus structure, and the split between full-time and fractional DevTools PMMs. Sliced by region, company stage, and years of experience.
- Question 02
Reporting line
Does the DevTools PMM report to the CEO, the VP of Product, the VP of Marketing, the Head of DevRel, or somewhere else — and how does the answer change between seed, Series A, B, and C+ companies?
- Question 03
Tooling stack
What share of teams use Common Room, Orbit, Linen, Linear, GitHub Insights, Posthog, Amplitude, and other developer-signal tools? Where do PMMs actually pull their data from on a Monday morning?
- Question 04
Headcount ratios
PMM-per-engineer and PMM-per-DevRel ratios at each company stage. Also: is there a single solo PMM, a duo, or a team — and at what ARR does the second hire land?
- Question 05
Motion: PLG vs sales-led
How does the company's primary motion (self-serve / sales-led / hybrid) shape the PMM job description — what artifacts get built, what metrics get owned, what gets pushed to DevRel or sales enablement.
- Question 06
DevRel ↔ PMM boundary
Who owns the conference budget, who owns the docs information architecture, who owns the competitive comparison pages, who owns developer community programs. Where is the line actually drawn in practice.
- Question 07
Toughest part of the job (qualitative)
Open-ended: what is the hardest, most under-resourced part of being a DevTools PMM today? Coded after fieldwork into a theme taxonomy that will be published alongside the raw responses.
- Question 08
What worked: top GTM experiments of 2025–26
Open-ended: name up to three GTM experiments or programs that genuinely moved a number for you in the last 12–18 months. Published as a curated, anonymized pattern library.
Methodology
Target sample: N ≥ 100 completed responses from working DevTools product marketers. If response is light, fieldwork extends rather than the report shipping on thin data.
Sampling frame: voluntary response. Recruited through LinkedIn outreach, Sharebird, DevTools-focused Slack and Discord communities, and the author's warm network from JetBrains, Lightrun, Odigos, and Reforge. Voluntary-response sampling has known bias — the report will name it explicitly rather than claim representativeness.
Fieldwork window: Q1–Q2 2026. Pilot of 8–12 respondents first to validate question wording; full launch after pilot debrief.
Open data commitment:the report and the full anonymized response dataset (CSV) will be published free, no email gate. Anyone — practitioners, journalists, DevTools founders — can re-aggregate the raw data and verify the report's claims.
Pre-registration: this page itself is the pre-registration. The questions, methodology, and hypotheses are time-stamped here before fieldwork begins. If the design changes materially during pilot, the diff will be published transparently rather than rewritten silently.
The gap, in three numbers
These are framing data points from public sources — they describe the developer audience and the scale of the addressable market. They are not data about DevTools PMMs. That data is what this survey is going to produce.
Developers responding to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey — the largest annual census of working developers. By contrast, the population of marketers serving that audience has never been censused.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey · 2024→Projects on GitHub — the discovery surface most DevTools PMMs are positioning their product against. The scale of the addressable developer audience is unambiguous; the size of the PMM cohort serving it is not.
GitHub Octoverse · 2024→Approximate working estimate of DevTools-focused product marketers worldwide. Not measured anywhere — this is a claim derived from public LinkedIn search and DevTools company headcount math, which is exactly the kind of fuzziness this survey aims to replace with primary data.
Working estimate, this initiative · 2026→The first two figures link to their primary sources. The third is a working estimate disclosed as such — replacing fuzzy estimates with measured data is exactly the point of this initiative.
You are the dataset
Take the survey · 8 minutes
If you are a working product marketer at a DevTools, infrastructure, API, observability, security, or AI/ML developer-platform company — your response is exactly what makes this report exist. Eight minutes, fully anonymous, early access to the results, named credit only if you want it.
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FAQ
Who is running this survey?
Daria Dovzhikova — 12 years inside developer-first companies including 7 at JetBrains, plus PMM and growth leadership at Lightrun and Odigos. The survey is a solo practitioner initiative, not a vendor-sponsored research project, so there is no commercial bias built into the question design.
Why should I trust the numbers when they ship?
Three reasons. First, every response is anonymized and the full anonymized dataset will be published as a CSV alongside the written report so anyone can audit our aggregations. Second, the methodology, question wording, and sampling strategy are pre-published on this page before any data is collected. Third, the report will list confidence intervals and call out subsegments where N is too small to draw conclusions instead of papering over thin cells.
How do you handle anonymity?
No names, emails, or company names are stored alongside responses in the published dataset. The opt-in 'notify me when the report ships' email list is kept in a separate system and is never joined to survey responses. Free-text qualitative answers are reviewed for any incidental identifying detail before being published; redactions are noted with [redacted].
Can my company sponsor the report?
Not for this edition. To keep the report independent and free, the 2026 edition is fully unsponsored. If you want to support the work, the most useful thing is to share the survey with PMMs in your network — better N is worth more than a logo. Future editions may accept narrow research partnerships with clearly disclosed scope.
When does the report ship?
The survey is targeted to run Q1–Q2 2026, with the written report and open dataset published shortly after fieldwork closes. The exact timeline depends on hitting N ≥ 100; if response rate is light, fieldwork extends rather than the report shipping on thin data.
Will the data be free and open?
Yes. Both the written report and the full anonymized response dataset (CSV) will be free to download with no email gate. The opt-in notify list is for convenience — you do not need to be on it to access the results. The report and dataset will be published under a permissive license so PMMs, journalists, and DevTools founders can cite and re-analyze the data freely.
Who is running this
Daria Dovzhikova
Twelve years inside developer-first companies. Seven of them at JetBrains working across developer products and global marketing motions, followed by PMM and growth leadership at Lightrun (production debugging) and Odigos (eBPF observability). Reforge alum.
I run GTM Labs — fractional PMM and growth retainers for developer-first startups. This survey exists because every quarter I hear the same three questions from DevTools founders ("what should I pay this hire?", "who should they report to?", "how does this person split work with DevRel?") and I do not have a primary-source answer to point them at.
Related
Developer-First PMM
The discipline the report is measuring. What it is, what it isn't, and how it differs from enterprise PMM across eight axes.
Case studies
Three documented DevTools growth engagements with named outcomes — trial-to-paid, ARR, and AI agent positioning.
Services
Six engagement formats from $1,500 GTM Diagnostic to Growth Engine retainer. How I work with DevTools founders.
Ready when you are.
Discovery calls are 20 minutes. First one's on me.