Technical background, leadership role

Most Economic Buyers come from a technical background — they were developers once and understand technology deeply. Today, they are in leadership roles like CTO, VP of Engineering, Director of Software Development, or similar. They are no longer hands-on coding, but they still think like engineers and take pride in their technical competence. Dumbing down messaging for them might be perceived as insulting. They expect discussions to be technical, strategic, and financially grounded.

Accountable for strategic technical decisions

The EB is responsible for ensuring that the technologies chosen today will support the organization’s needs tomorrow. They think long-term about the cost of maintaining systems, team skillsets, technical debt, and the speed of delivering features to customers. While they might delegate the exploration and evaluation of new tools to senior developers or architects, they make the final call on whether the team should invest time and money into adopting something new.

Budget control and business alignment

Economic Buyers often control the engineering budget — or at least have significant influence over it. They may need to seek final approval from a CEO, CFO, or procurement department for larger purchases, but typically they shape and lead the budget request process. They think not just about licensing costs, but also the hidden costs of adoption: training, migration, support, maintenance, and long-term viability.

EBs live at the intersection of technology and business. They constantly balance competing priorities: keeping developers happy and productive, delivering projects on time, maintaining technical quality, and aligning engineering work with company goals. They think about value delivered over time — not just today’s velocity.

Works through the team

Economic Buyers rarely make unilateral decisions on new technology. Instead, they listen to recommendations from trusted technical leads and thought leaders inside the team. A successful technology purchase usually follows a bottom-up path: the team identifies a need, experiments with possible solutions, validates their effectiveness, and then brings a strong case to the EB.

However, if the team fails to advocate convincingly, or if the EB senses hidden risks (vendor lock-in, scalability issues, unclear ROI), they will veto or delay the purchase. The EB’s ultimate loyalty is to the organization's long-term success — not to the wishes of individual developers.

Focus on long-term impact

While developers focus on short-term productivity, Economic Buyers worry about long-term consequences. They are cautious about adopting flashy new tools that could create maintenance nightmares down the line. They prioritize sustainability: clean architecture, manageable systems, realistic roadmaps, and predictable costs. They need to feel confident that any technology adopted today will not become a liability tomorrow.

Respected in their team

Thought Leaders are highly skilled developers. They have typically worked in their organizations for years, but are almost never C-level. Their contributions are critical, and they always have their organization's best interests in mind.

Product adoption

Thought Leaders are relatively active in discovering, researching and sharing insights about interesting new technologies, both within their organization and on external platforms. Their relationship with a product might be a brief trial before moving on, or they might become long-term champions of the product inside their organization.

Thought leaders are the ones who find us, let's optimize discovery for them.

Long-term vision

Thought Leaders know their organization's processes and technologies inside out. Thus, they can consider the impact of any technological change on their organization in a holistic manner. Any core technology needs to endure time and remain in production even 10 years from now. They need to be supported so that security and other issues won't become their team's burden eventually.

Fears

Thought Leaders fear of advocating, or becoming responsible for a technology that leads to a development dead-end, stuck with an abandoned and unmaintained technology, endless maintenance work, and eventually an expensive migration of products to a new technology.

Professional developers

A typical developer works in a dev team with other professional developers. Although they might aspire to be a Thought Leader in the future, today they are not calling the shots. They might not have time to be learning new skills or trying new technologies on the daily basis.

Participates in product adoption

All developers share their opinions about any technologies they come across with their colleagues. They might not all suggest new technologies to the team, but they can block the adoption if they have a poor experience using it. They might participate in the evaluation process or prototyping with the rest of the team, comparing frameworks, scoring findings, etc. Often, their needs can be easy to satisfy: provide good documentation and enough learning materials.

Works with the tools provided

On average, developers are not very actively looking for new tools or technologies to try out due to demands of their current project. They might not be up to date on latest development trends, and sometimes even 5 years behind on current trends. They are willing (or forced) to work with whatever tools their team or organization decides to use, and if the tools work, they'll keep coding away until someone brings in a new set of tools.

Productivity = Resolved issues

While it might not be reasonably, developer's performance is often seen through the number of resolved issues in a sprint. Quality is sometimes negotiable, as long as things get done. UX might not be that high in their priorities, and it might be unclear what even makes a good user experience beyond a logically structured UI.

Focus on the short-term

Early in their careers, developers are often still finding their place. In their work, they tend to not think for the long-term consequences of their choices, and focus on short-term goals and getting things done. There's some fear and avoidance of wasting time in long, elaborate solutions, which might be thrown away and kill your velocity.

The Jaded Developer

Jaded developers are typically in senior positions, such as lead developers and architects, with over a decade of experience from many projects. They've burned themselves in the past with technologies that made too lofty promises of benefits that turned out to be unsustainable. They are skeptical towards any bold claims and understand there are no silver bullets. They require hard proof, in-depth materials and first-hand validation before they accept something as a fact. But after validating your claims they can become your strongest advocate in their organization.

The Crafter Developer

"Why would I use your product when I can do this project just the way I like it with my favorite technologies, frameworks, libraries and tools?" Crafters avoid opinionated products and platforms, where decisions have been made for them beforehand. It's not just a matter of opinion - some might feel superior to developers who just assemble web apps from ready-made components. Crafters take their time to maintain their skills and professional value, so accepting someone else's opinions would be devaluating your own skils.

The Student Developer

Even though professional developers should be the main target audience of any commercial brand, it's important to acknowledge students - tomorrow's professional devs - as well. Students appreciate simplicity, great documentation and lots of learning resources for every skill level.

#1 Developer first

Be authentic and transparent. It's easier to trust messages from a real person with a name and a face. Content written by developers to developers have also much higher engagement rate. Respect the time and personal details developers have given to you. Offer swag or show other acts of gratitude when appropriate.

Don't try to bypass developers' needs or step on them like a stepping stone to reach decision makers with commercial offering. Don't trick developers with "Contact Us" buttons that will place them on a sales team hit list. If someone wishes to have a meeting with you and spend an hour of their time, it's immediately suspicious - what do they expect to have in return for their time.

#2 Don't push - Let them pull

Developers are turned off by sugar coated materials and websites with too much whitespace, and become skeptical of promises without concrete proof. Give them a GitHub repo they can clone and experiment with to reach the same conclusions on their own.

Avoid bad marketing automation. It's tone deaf and untimely, and tells developers they are not respected or recognized as who they are, but as faceless leads in a marketing automation sequence. Be very aware of each developer's progress with your product. Don't push on with more features, trials or commercial offerings just after registration – developers are not ready to consider such things so early. Don't try to skip developer's needs and reach out to their decision maker too soon.

Allow developers to ask for more when they're ready. Offer opportunities to join Q&A sessions, weekly onboarding group sessions or other events that will happen regardless of their personal attendance. Offer a reply possibility to onboarding emails, e.g. "If you have any questions, reply to this email and ask away, Sami from our team will get back to you with an answer". When developers have the initiative, and they feel there's no target painted in their backs, they can relax.

#3 Don't sell - Help them sell

Due to the prevalence of bad marketing, even the faintest signals, like a careless choice of words, can tip the interpretation of your message from developer-relevant to sales-irrelevant. Facing commercial messages too soon or just in the wrong place in the journey will lead the developers into thinking they will need to sales just around the corner. As a consequence, many will drop off.

If a developer is not in acute need of a tool, or otherwise motivated to explore new tools, it will be very difficult to get them invest their time in evaluating your product beyond a few clicks. It might take several starts and restarts to get them really started. Before that semi-serious evaluation journey has been completed, it's highly unlikely they would connect your sales team with their decision maker.

Developers need to feel the excitement and satisfaction from using your product before they are ready for anything else. When they want to use your product, they want to tell others about it and become your brand advocates inside their organizations. This would be the right time to point them towards extensive materials tailored for their decision makers. When this approach is done right, they will ask you to contact their Economic Buyer, not the other way around.