The Business Value of Your Developer Ecosystem

In this article we discuss:

• (In)Direct Revenue from Developer Activity
• The Value of a Deep and Knowledgeable Ecosystem
• Developers as Influencers and Decision Makers
• Developers Win, Too
• Defining the DevRel ROI so the Business Understands

To be in developer relations (DevRel) is to constantly field a very specific, and often frustrating, question: "How do developers drive revenue?"

I hear these questions everywhere: in meetings, at cocktail parties, and even when I walk my dog.

“But Nick!” they stop me and ask, “What’s the actual ROI of DevRel? What would you say you do at Workday?”

You should know I have very astute neighbors and a very cute dog. I know they mean well.

But these questions miss the broader point of a platform and the people who build on it. A platform without developers is like a stage without its actors. It’s empty. Developers are the ones actually building what matters. They extend a platform’s reach and solve critical problems for users, bridging the gap between a tool's potential and its real-world impact.

A developer’s value, then, isn’t fully captured on a revenue statement but in the thriving communities they create, empower, and serve.

Quantifying the value of a developer program is complex because it is so multifaceted. It’s different from measuring an employee’s productivity or a customer’s direct spend. Instead of simple direct revenue, it’s essential to shift focus to measuring ecosystem contribution and the shared knowledge developers bring to their communities.

I’m a Workday developer, and a proud one. So of course I’m motivated by this.

Calculating the value of an external developer (a member of a developer program) to a company is complex because it is so multifaceted. It’s different from valuing an employee or a customer. Instead of measuring productivity and direct revenue, I think we need to measure ecosystem contribution and indirect revenue generation.

(In)Direct Revenue from Developer Activity

Let me start with the easiest answer, since not all the revenue impact is indirect. For example, with the launch of Workday Marketplace and the Built on Workday partner program, partner developers (and customer developers who join the program) can directly monetize the solutions they build using Marketplace Apps. It’s incredible!

It’s rewarding to tie the value gained from Marketplace apps directly to developers. Serving the folks that build these apps is a partnership between our fabulous Global Partner Organization and DevRel and Developer Marketing. I think this has been an incredible success for Workday and for the developers building these apps, but it’s not the whole value story.

It’s definitely the easiest story (there is direct revenue we can attribute to their work—hooray!), but it’s not the whole story. Not even close.

With the launch of Flex Credits, I expect to see more revenue directly attributable to developer activity and the agentic apps, API calls, and integrations they build. Developers are not only the ones using the platform, but building the machinery that itself uses the platform. 

Not only this, but if there are new SKUs or offerings tied to platform monetization, empowering and activating a broad set of developers and making it easy for developers to use those offerings drives overall adoption of the new offerings and accompanying revenue.

In other words: When you monetize the platform, developers become central to how it scales.

The Value of a Deep and Knowledgeable Ecosystem

While revenue is one clear outcome of a healthy developer ecosystem, its value compounds across customer outcomes, product innovation, and network effects that strengthen the platform over time. Here are three main ways a developer ecosystem delivers value:

1. Value Creation for Customers

Even customer developers who aren’t contributing to the Marketplace are contributing significant value to customers. The strength of Workday is in our ecosystem. Tens of thousands of admins, architects, developers, configurators, and experts have poured their hearts and souls into their Workday implementations and the implementations of their clients.

That knowledge base is deep. And when that knowledge is applied, it directly removes friction for customers, improves customer satisfaction, and makes Workday a stickier platform for its customers. 

Developers meaningfully impact the platform's value proposition for end users.

Growing the population of knowledgeable, credentialed developers creates a bigger talent pool that customers and partners can draw from, and there are positive network effects that emerge from that: more developers answering more questions, creating more innovation, and sharpening each other to make the ecosystem better for all.

2. Community-Led R&D

External developers are often force multipliers, building the features and specialized solutions a platform alone can’t prioritize. I think of it as our long tail of innovation. If we were to estimate the engineering cost to build every integration and app our customers want but that we can't prioritize, then we can estimate the R&D costs saved by having developers build those requested features on the platform.

This has even more knock-on effects:

• Reduced Churn: Customers who make heavy use of tools like Workday Extend churn at a lower rate than customers who don’t.
• Feature Parity Value: If a developer builds a "must-have" tool that the platform doesn't provide natively, then that developer's value is equivalent to the customer acquisition cost (CAC) saved by the platform not having to build and market that feature itself. The ecosystem becomes stronger.

3. The Knowledge Network Effect

Platform members provide expertise that lowers barriers to platform success:

• Community Support Value: We can (and should) directly value developer contributions to forums (ex: Developer Forum, Community Integrations forum) that reduce official support ticket volume. 
• Open Source/Beta Contributions: Bugs reported and code contributions to SDKs and libraries create real engineering value. As platforms take a more open approach over time, developer contributions will play an even bigger role in improving quality, stability, and iteration speed.

I’ve experienced this myself as a partner. There were many instances where getting help from fellow Workday developers saved me and my clients from having to open Workday support tickets. Our community rocks!

Developers as Influencers and Decision-Makers

Developers are influencers of some of our key buyers in the office of the CIO (oCIO). For technical products and technical decisions, who do you think the oCIO will turn to to make an honest recommendation based on the reality of what those tools can do? Their developers.

Whether a developer has been able to quickly get started with your product, understand the solutions they can achieve with it, and whether it’s ergonomic to their workflow are all critical to whether they will recommend it to their leadership.

In B2B, nobody just wakes up and buys a solution. Even in the world of product-led growth, you could have someone using the freemium version of your software for years and then finally convert. Having developers in your corner as vocal proponents of your software gives us a higher propensity of closing a deal and acquiring a customer or a new SKU.

In a crowded market of platform solutions, the winner is often the one with the most active ecosystem (ex: iOS vs. Windows Phone). That’s why at Workday we have a huge vested interest in increasing our “share of voice” among all developers—so that it becomes the industry default.

If you don’t capture those developers now, your competitors will, creating a barrier to entry that’s very difficult to overcome later.

Developers Win, Too

For our partner developers, the Workday platform is a route to market. Marketplace visibility, access to enterprise customers, and the ability to monetize solutions create real economic opportunity. And as adoption grows, so does the total addressable market for the apps, integrations, and services developers provide.

For customer developers, deep platform expertise also translates to internal leverage. Building quickly, solving business problems, and guiding architectural decisions elevates the developer role from implementer to strategic advisor. When developers can advocate for tools that make them more effective, they gain credibility and influence within their organizations and with leaders at every level.

And when a platform invests seriously in developer enablement, it becomes easier to transform ideas into real solutions. Developers can build with confidence, bring their work to market faster, and extend their reach inside large organizations. As the ecosystem grows, so does the surface area for their expertise and the demand for what they create.

The value of a strong developer ecosystem compounds because their individual wins scale—through reusable solutions, community knowledge, and accelerating adoption across the platform.

Defining the DevRel ROI so the Business Understands

So, the ultimate question to my DevRel folks: How do you prove the value of your existence?

It’s really the same question you could ask of any marketing team. For a lot of what we do, we don’t see the impact of it for two or three quarters, maybe even one or two years.

Gary Gonzales (Catchy) put forward some good questions in this fabulous webinar I highly recommend you watch:

• Have we influenced more people than the year before with the core goals that we have?
• Share of voice is key — who in the market knows you exist? And are there more people in the market that know you exist than there were the year before?
• Have you built the conditions so that a sale or an install has a higher propensity of happening. That’s the challenge you have. The ROI is that we’ve improved the conditions to penetrate further into a market.

The developer touches so much and we can track so much, so it can be difficult to know what to focus on. I think there are four main developer relations metrics to prioritize, knowing that a public company expects us to answer how we’re driving revenue and how we’re driving value for shareholders. At the end of the day, I agree with Gary that the following are a fantastic place to start:

• Are we driving more revenue from this bottom up approach of empowering developers to help increase product acquisition?

• Are we building longer lasting customer relationships, improving CSAT?

• Are we supporting product growth and innovation?

• Is user growth going up? Is active usage (MAD / MAU) going up?

Something important discussed in that webinar is that everything you are building with a developer ecosystem is a long-term play. You need to make a plan and stick to it. The bigger the organization, the harder that is to do. Workday is a big place, but our leadership is rightly focused on growing and activating a bigger and bigger developer ecosystem.

These are heady times, and I could not be more proud to be a part of growing that community, and certainly not just for the financial bottom line. The bottom line that matters is this: Your ecosystem is valuable and about to grow big-time. The work you do matters and makes life better for every single user out there.

At Workday, that’s what motivates me to keep doing what I do.

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