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Speaker A: All right. Hi everyone, you're listening to Scaling DevTools. I'm joined today by Dave from Lead Dev.
Speaker B: Welcome, Dave. Hi, lovely to be here.
Speaker A: Well, yeah, I should say it's lovely for me to be here.
Speaker B: Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, welcome.
Speaker A: We are at Lead Dev and could you tell us a bit about Lead Dev?
Speaker B: So the event here is LDX3, which is our flagship event in London. We've got 2,500, over 2,500 engineering leaders, so engineering managers right up to directors, VPs, staff plus principal engineers, that sort of audience. We're pretty sure we're the largest concentration of senior engineering leadership in the world. We have a similar event over in New York, and we've got a packed-out event. It's the biggest it's ever been, and it's been a really exciting couple of days.
Speaker A: Yeah, amazing. I went to one of your previous events in the US, and so it's my second one, and it's really great. So really happy to be here, and thank you for having me.
Speaker B: Oh yeah, thanks for coming.
Speaker A: So one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is we interview a lot of DevTools founders here and kind of get the DevTools perspective, which I know you have too. But the thing I'm really interested in is you're also talking to a lot of the engineering leaders at companies that are buying developer tools and seeing how they're thinking. And I'd love to kind of get— I know you've done a lot of research in this— get a bit of insight into how things are playing out on that side. Yeah, sure.
Speaker B: I mean, where do we start? We've got, since January, we've undertaken 150 interviews with audience members. We have to do this because we need to program content that's going to solve their problems. So we've got a lot of qualitative data there as well, and we run whole-scale audience surveys as well for the quant. And part of that survey, we're asking them where they're buying, and it will surprise no one, well over half of them are buying AI coding tools at the moment. And then there's a— and that's Our intent window is the next 12 months. So about 52% of the whole audience reporting buying AI coding tools. Sure. More interesting is about 20% of them are buying some of the core categories, things like CI/CD, monitoring and observability, QA and testing tools. And the really interesting— a really interesting difference is when we look at the more senior members of our audience, so VPs, directors. And what we see there is, sure, that they're reporting that they are buying AI coding tools, but also we've seen downstream tooling really popular amongst that audience. So almost as many of them looking at monitoring observability as they are AI coding tools, CI/CD, QA. I think that's just a sign of the times that we're in. That's where the pain is being felt downstream from the code generation that has largely been automated.
Speaker A: So, it's not just the headline stuff, it's also the underlying tools that they're very interested in.
Speaker B: Yeah. And the problem has been removed from code generation and it's gone down to getting it into production, making sure that that stuff is reliable, making sure that you're, all of a sudden, for our audience, security was always a little bit of a difficult topic, quite dry. They like to build things, not necessarily worry about too much about how to secure them. All of a sudden, that's rising up for list of things they need to be— that they're worried about because they can— or the loss of control through all of this code that's getting out there that's not necessarily had the same scrutiny applied to it.
Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're good. Yeah. And then something that we spoke about just before this that I thought was really interesting is how companies are positioning AI in terms of their offering?
Speaker B: Yeah, so this comes out in our Qual research a lot, and engineers, engineering leaders are a skeptical bunch at the best of times, and particularly around AI, they have very strong bullshit detectors. And so it's a really difficult area to navigate as a marketer, I think, getting the messaging right. Many of the dev tools that we've got as customers have gone strong on AI-first messaging, and that can be quite a dangerous thing to do with our audience. So only a little over half of them have a positive view of AI, and so a large chunk of the buyers are going to start putting barriers up if you're leading with big AI-first claims. The thing that we're seeing in the research strongly is that the pain, the underlying pain points haven't changed that much. The things that they are really caring about are velocity, reliability, tech These are the things that are top of the list of pain points. AI implementation isn't, isn't anywhere close to those three. So if you've, if you've got a product, talk to those, the fundamental pain points that you know this audience are facing, and be careful about how you are messaging the AI features or how your product is fitting into this new AI world, particularly if it's sounding like hype, which is going to actually chase people away. It's— that's not to say there aren't opportunities, so— and the opportunities come from really credible teaching. The question I think that a lot of the audience out there have got this year is, how do I do this? How do I get these gains? Show me some real examples. Give me some depth. Go into the specifics. And so if you're able to stand up there and teach and say, like, okay, let's— it's a given that we are living in an AI world, right? It is a given that most teams writing code with AI. AI is everywhere. It's in engineering. It's appearing in all industries. That's just the environment you're in. That's not the thing you should be talking about. Talk to me about the specifics. Talk to me about how you can take this technology and solve those downstream problems that you've now got. Unblock the gates that
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have become your new bottleneck. Used to be coding at something else. Talk about the real specifics of how these engineering leaders are going to get the gains or solve their pains. Just stick to the basics. We had Liz Fong-Jones from Honeycomb on stage yesterday giving a fantastic talk all about their AI adoption journey, not big headline figures, but the specifics of how they got there. And that's the sort of content that this audience laps up, and that's how you get in there. Only you can open the door.
Speaker A: Yeah, so it's kind of spelling out the specific challenges rather than just saying AI.
Speaker B: Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. AI, don't stop talking about 2x-ing or 10x-ing your your velocity. That's not— those sorts of claims are just going to get laughed out of town.
Speaker A: And obviously we're in London, and, you know, I can imagine that we're going to get some head-nodding people listening, but also people in the Valley, you know, startup, like fast-growing startups and stuff, they're in this world where everything is AI and— and is there— they might have a question of like, okay, maybe this applies in Europe, like, you know, there's much more skepticism. How are you seeing the differences in—
Speaker B: There are some differences between the States and Europe, but they're not massive. The sort of hype detector is there on both sides of the Atlantic. There is more acceptance of the change in the States. There's a little bit more fear over there as well. But there aren't massive differences across the audience in terms of how they are processing this. There are regional differences around things like data sovereignty being something that matters to this audience over here, but I don't think there are big differences that really affect the vendors.
Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So maybe it's overblown a little bit.
Speaker B: I should qualify some of this with, you know, it depends on where you are, right? And who you're talking to. And I think this is why it's really tricky for vendors to get this messaging right. If you're at an event that is pure AI, then of course you can lean into some of that messaging a bit more. I would say if it's pure AI with engineers, you should stick to your specifics and lead with specifics, of course. If you're talking to exec-level CIOs, I think they might be more receptive to some of that big benefits-led, big picture messaging. But if you're talking to buyers and engineering teams, be really careful with it. That's— and I think that is true on both sides of the Atlantic.
Speaker A: Are there any Maybe putting you on the spot here, but are there any specific examples of companies that you've seen sort of do the messaging really well?
Speaker B: There was one, but you have put me on the spot because I cannot remember the site.
Speaker A: Sorry, I just think it would be cool if you just had one.
Speaker B: Yeah, I actually, I think I published something on LinkedIn about it when I saw it. I cannot remember the specifics. It was good. They were acknowledging their— yeah, I cannot remember.
Speaker A: Sorry, that was an on-the-spot one. Okay, and then so that's from the buyer's perspective, and I know you're also talking to a lot of dev tools companies that are sponsoring and working with you. What kind of— are you seeing any trends and things there that could be helpful to?
Speaker B: I mean, I'm going to say this. I think that digital channels are getting really crowded, and so a lot of them are talking about in-person interactions. That's not just events like us, but a lot I'm seeing, particularly in the States, quite a lot of vendors running their own, like, exec dinners. They're running their own meetups. There's a lot of, like, in-person events around, some really interesting kind of in-person outbound, like physical outbound, which is starting, which in this world where— Physical outbound?
Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: Knocking on doors? Well, no, I mean interesting gifts, stuff, physical things through the post, landing on your desk, because I think that's where when you worked so hard online to get the cut-through, that's where you can get an advantage. And actually, it's an area that's been slightly vacated, hasn't it? And of course, there's no better place than at an event like this. And I think also borne out in the— I think it's boom time actually for DevTools at the moment, certainly in the data that we're seeing. 2 years ago, I think we had like 27% of— yeah, 2 years ago we had 27% of our audience saying that they were increasing the spending this year compared to last year. Now that's up to, I think, 36% this year. So it's like a real jump. So there's money out there, but you just got to figure out where to meet them, and no better place than than in person, in my view.
Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. It's great to be here. Probably too close. I've got you sitting too close to me here. OK, so I know you've got to go off and MC a—
Speaker B: Manager stage.
Speaker A: Manager stage. Sorry, manager stage. If any DevTools listening want to either attend or sponsor an event in the future, where can they—
Speaker B: Just check out leaddev.com. We've got, I mean, there's a lot of online content there which we use to feed the leads into our events as well. But you can find all the information out about the sponsorship packages there.
Speaker A: Amazing. Thank you so much, Dave. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Speaker B: Likewise.
Speaker A: Cheers, guys. Cool.
Speaker B: Thanks everyone for listening. I lost your mic halfway through that, so I started