Bringing Dev and Rev together
The platform that connects makers to customers through the product
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Introducing DevRev
The World’s First Developer CRM
You have Jira. You like Slack.
You will love DevRev.
You have Product. You want PLG.
You will love DevRev.
You have Code. You need PMF.
You will love DevRev.
We are squarely in the product-led era.
But a developer’s work is still devoid of any connection to the customer. Their business impact is impossible to measure and we are drowning in tools and systems to stitch together common workflows.
We believe there is a better way.
What if we connected Developers to Customers through the Product?
Imagine a system that ties work directly to user impact and business outcomes.
We call it a Dev CRM.
What DevRev Delivers
Developer + Product + Customer
Break Down Front and Back Office Silos
Implement a converged Ticket and Issue Management system to enable seamless work collaboration across teams.
Foster Customer Centricity
Empower makers to always understand ‘the why’ by connecting customer touchpoints directly to developer priorities.
Become Product-Led
Gain a more thoughtful understanding of problems, success metrics, and goals by creating a unified customer and product system of record.
Product + Customer Centricity.
As Simple as A, B, C.
A
The Evolution of Issue and Ticket Management
Ditch the status/update meeting. A converged system of record for work links together every customer conversation, feature request, and new product enhancement. Ensure your manager, customer success/support team, and customer is always kept up to date on the state of your work.
Ditch the status/update meeting. A converged system of record for work links together every customer conversation, feature request, and new product enhancement. Ensure your manager, customer success/support team, and customer is always kept up to date on the state of your work.
B
Revolutionizing Customer Communications
A tool you can love. Inject DevRev’s PLuG SDK into your application to gain the power to nudge, guide, and support your users. Paint a better picture of your customer.
A tool you can love. Inject DevRev’s PLuG SDK into your application to gain the power to nudge, guide, and support your users. Paint a better picture of your customer.
C
Breakthrough Product Insights
Value outcomes over output. Visualize how every microservice and API powers your features and capabilities, enriching your Dev and Rev Parts with events, metrics, and goals. Create emotionally inspiring value propositions.
Value outcomes over output. Visualize how every microservice and API powers your features and capabilities, enriching your Dev and Rev Parts with events, metrics, and goals. Create emotionally inspiring value propositions.
Connect Developers to Customers & Revenue
A Single Platform for Product-Led Growth
Vistas
Work (management) meets play! All your issues, tickets, features, and services in one place with native, real-time collaboration and reporting.
Issues
Tickets
Customer Management
Trails
Sum of your parts is truly greater than the whole. A system of record that enriches and connects your services (Dev parts) to the features and capabilities used by your customers (Rev parts). Like a brain - one part logical, one part emotional.
Dev Parts
Rev Parts
Discovery & Enrichment
PLuG
Customer interactions SDK that makes your application customer aware and product-centric. Listen. Talk. Walk the walk (a mile in your customer’s shoes).
Live Chat
Self-Service Support
Nudges
Feature Roadmap
A lot Shipped, a lot More to Ship
Customer Identity
Rev APIs to connect and manage customers and users
Shipped
Knowledge Article Indexing and Search
Upload or link knowledge repos for federated search across documentation
Shipped
Part Discovery
Auto-discover microservices and features through connectors
Shipped
Customizable Customer Identities
Add custom attributes and types to converge all your customer data
Shipped
PLuG Self-Service Support
Enable Customers to query against your documents and articles
In Progress
Multi-Player Vistas
Browse, share, and collaborate on pre-filtered list views
In Progress
Work Data Model customization
Customize issues and tickets by adding new fields and types
In Progress
My Tasks
Build a personal list of todo items and see all your work sub tasks in one place
In Progress
Frequently Asked Questions
We’re Here to Help
Imagine never having to think - "What is the impact of my work on my organization?" Whether you are working on a bug or a feature, always know and understand the impact on your customers and your company. Since all your work is connected to all the parts and the customer touchpoint, it also helps you in prioritizing your work and focusing on what matters.
As a product manager, you can visually see all your microservices and APIs and how they are connected to all the features and capabilities that your customers use and pay within Trails. You can also view rich product insights thereby helping you make better decisions around product roadmap prioritizations and drive product-led growth strategies.
All your customer conversations are connected to the product features and capabilities in one place and you can get real-time help from the developers within your organization that owns these parts. This helps you provide better customer experience that directly affects your growth and revenue.
You can use DevRev for customer touchpoints, customer interactions and to nudge your users with our SDK and APIs. You can use DevRev to manage all your work including issues, tickets and tasks in real-time, in a groundbreaking new way that is connected to all your product features. You can use DevRev for maintaining a system of record for your product helping you better understand the impact of your work to your customers and your business.
We believe DevRev brings in features and capabilities on a single platform that no other platform currently provides. Having said that, we also believe in co-existing with other tools and platforms and have built out a long list of connectors and integrations. You can check these out in our marketplace webpage (coming soon).
DevRev Walkthrough
PLuG, Vista and Trails
DevRev Beta v.1.0.0
Product Demonstration
Chapter 01
Our Vision
DevRev Ethos:
To Help Build the Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Companies.
2502 Words, 5 Min Read
What is a Dev CRM?
Developers are too far removed from the customer. Organizational silos, each with their own set of tools and applications, only amplify the disconnect.
A DevCRM connects the makers to the customer by delivering a system of record, social experience, and a suite of platform connections to create a single source of truth for all customer, product, and work-related data.
We imagined:
- A single platform replacing some systems and augmenting others
- System integrations to gather events/context (e.g., monitoring alerts, git events, etc.)
- A modern browser interface
- Fully extensible API platform
With DevRev, developers and engineers are empowered to build, operate, support, and grow their products in the most customer-centric way possible.
So how does it work?
We bring together traditional SaaS workflows and combine them into a single data model. Issue and ticket management (Work) are linked to internal and external users (Identity) respectively and related to the services that serve the features that customers consume (Parts).
- Issue Management: Traditional issue-management tools require users to track all of their tasks manually. Through automated workflows and code-repository integration, we remove most manual data entries once code starts to get written, saving developers time and ensuring the system of record is always up to date.
- Ticket Management: Customers are the number-one source of feedback, but most of this data is locked away and only exposed via clunky integrations. DevRev enables issues like bugs, new features, and enhancements to be directly linked to tickets that provide the qualitative and quantitative data to support priorities.
- In-App Chat: DevRev's platform provides a lightweight SDK for embedding DevRev's live-chat and ticket-deflection PLuG widget directly into your application and website. Now every customer conversation is captured and linked to tickets, and no details become lost in translation.
- Product + Customer-Centricity: Move beyond projects and start becoming product-led through the connected links between Dev and Rev parts, your team's work, and your customer. All tickets and issues connect back to the features and capabilities that a customer consumes. Know who is working on what features, review your roadmap, see the latest KPIs, and easily track and maintain internal and external conversations via DevRev Trails.
Unlike traditional systems that silo customers from the builders, DevRev provides one unified platform where builders, supporters, growers, operators, and customers can all work together. By converging typically siloed systems and teams, with a product centric model, DevRev minimizes translation errors and consolidates your company's most important data into a single platform and system of record.
We created a DevCRM because we envisioned a better way to combine product-centricity with customer-centricity. We believe that company-builders of all types should have access to a modern methodology for creating products, coupled with a digital experience powering the four primary functions of a company - Build, Operate, Support, and Grow.
DevRev's platform ensures that businesses both retain a sharp focus on growing and nurturing end-users and maintain tight alignment between employees and customers. Finally, DevRev is platform-first, enabling developers to do more with extensible APIs, SDKs, and third-party connectors.
Chapter 02
Becoming Product-Led
Product-Led. Customer Focused.
Our mission is to help companies connect makers (Dev) to customers (Rev).
Becoming a product-led company
When every department of a company adopts a “product-thinking” mindset to their operational values, the organization and the customers of that organization realize the benefits of becoming product-led.
Great teams build great products by promoting diversity of opinions, fostering experimentation, learning and iterating fast, and most importantly, by understanding their customer such that a harmonious balance is realized between innovation, customer success, and business value.
This results in a culture that promotes outcomes over outputs and a decision-making framework that delivers both customer and business value.
As a company grows, it is common to experience a loss of both customer- and product-centricity. The values that drove the team's early success seem to wane, and leaders may find themselves asking questions like:
- Why are we so reactive, and why do we no longer anticipate customer requirements?
- Why don't our new capabilities make the same impact as before?
- Why doesn't the product team understand the customer? Why doesn't the marketing team understand the product?
- Why don't we make as many big, ambitious bets as we did before?
These challenges often arise because rewards (e.g., budget, headcount, promotions) greatly influence behaviors.
Enterprise SaaS applications all focus on ways to support and report on the project management aspects of a job function, but they fail to provide a reward framework that ties the impact of work back to the customer. These apps nudge individuals and teams to rely on a “project-thinking” mindset vs. a “product-thinking” mindset, and the by-product of doing so is the creation of organizational silos reliant on internal metrics to measure success.
In contrast, DevRev strives to provide an intuitive experience that promotes the highest-value functions of product and customer-centricity. The DevRev Methodology promotes a balance between product thinking and project thinking, enabling all of our users to adopt a product-led mindset across an organization.
Chapter 03
DevRev Terminology
A ‘Dev’ is a DevRev user who develops, builds, and/or provides services
to a customer (‘Rev’).
At DevRev, we believe that the path to becoming product and customer centric starts by empowering makers, and the best way to achieve this is to bring makers closer to customers.
via an integrated application experience and an extensible platform that connects our three core objects: identity, work, and parts.
By connecting work to product and product to customers, we bind all of the organizational services required to build, operate, grow, and support a business.
PARTS
A part is a related piece of a product (e.g., a software product) that has a lifecycle (creation, evolution, deprecation) and can be recursively made of smaller parts. Events and work items can be specific to any type of part.
The part hierarchy is at the core of the DevRev platform and is the basis to tie work, metrics, and other events to a common product or service model.
We break a “part” down into two core Types
Rev Parts
- Rev parts related to how a product is expressed, integrated, or consumed.
- These parts may be purchased and interacted with by internal (employees) and external (revs) customers
Examples of Rev Parts include
Product
- At the highest level of the part hierarchy is a product or service. An organization may have one or more products or services that they deliver to their customer(s). A product is usually the entity around which a business is organized and their PnL is monitored.
- Minimal set of capabilities
- Lowest level in the part hierarchy where revenue* can be assigned
- Lowest level where market category is created
Capability
- An independent set of features, that is prominent enough to define a minimum product offering and is measurable, observable, upgradable, and potentially monetizable.
Feature
- Independent API or cluster of APIs
- Lowest level in part hierarchy that can be enabled/disabled
- Lowest level in part hierarchy that can be Metered*
- Lowest level in part hierarchy that can be usage tracked*
Dev parts (built or provided)
- Dev parts are those built internally related to code or something the developer relies on or builds, or a service a provider provides
- Although they may provide the functionality exposed and interacted with by the customer, they are often abstracted and unknown to the user
- Example types include Microservices, Code, and Libraries
The following figure shows how Dev and Rev Parts materialize in the DevRev app via Trails:
Chapter 04
Project vs. Product Thinking
Project vs. Product Thinking
Leave the project-management tools behind
The Project Management Institute (PMI) defines a project as “any temporary endeavor with a definite beginning and end.”
The goal for a project is therefore to break down a series of tasks into a planned timeline, with the primary achievement being the deliverable.
The implementation of agile and other project-management frameworks led most software development teams to over-rotate on the deliverable
The inverse of a “project mindset” is a “product mindset.” Product thinking abstracts the deliverable as the goal and substitutes it with an understanding of the impact, measures, and options.
Instead of emphasizing when work will be completed, who is responsible, and the path to completion, product thinkers debate the “why.”
- Why is this a priority?
- Why is it important to do now?
- Why do our customers want this?
The result is better alignment on the problem being solved, the metrics to measure success, and the goal and outcome that we hope to achieve, along with deeper discussion of the solution sets to address the problem, differentiate the product, and delight the customer.
Project thinking still holds an important place in software development, but a DevCRM strikes the balance between both mindsets to reinforce long-term behaviors.
Enterprise apps today cater to the manager, promoting behaviors that are purely output-driven. While product-thinking applications and tools are gaining in prominence, they are too far decoupled from developers and work management to reinforce equality between product values like “empowerment” and “effectiveness” and project values like “efficiency” and “action.”
By unifying the tools that enable product- and project-thinking processes, DevRev transforms how organizations operate and enables them to:
- Gain more thoughtful understanding of the problems that they are solving
- Reward positive outcomes over output
- Prioritize based on goals and welcome pivots if their impact is greater
- Create product value propositions that are both functional and emotionally inspiring
- Connect their work to customers and customer-impacting experiences
- Build a unified and aligned team, confident that thoughtful qualitative and quantitative data support product decisions
By bringing together project thinking and product thinking in a single tool, DevRev ensures that a harmonious and iterative culture drives team priorities, execution, and results.
Chapter-05
Building
DevRev Build Methodology
We are driven to empower makers with insight and purpose
DevRev Build Methodology
At DevRev, we are driven to empower makers with insight and purpose such that every member of the team shares ownership in the outcome of their work
when the problem and desired outcome are clear, the likelihood of success increases
- The foundation lies in connecting what you build (Dev Parts) to what a customer consumes (Rev Parts).
- DevRev enables organizations to connect the most impactful data about your user (RevU), customer (RevO), and revenue, to work and parts, such that goal definition and evaluation can be derived.
- Finally, by connecting all work back to the customer and product, DevRev provides a single platform for product-led planning. Starting with the why behind priorities, to defining an execution plan, and finally evaluating success criteria and future investment.
This level of transparency ensures that each member of the team has a sense of ownership to debate priorities and share in the accountability for the outcomes of their work.
How does this balance of “product thinking” and “project thinking” work in practice? At DevRev, we have templated our data model and processes to support this in a streamlined manner.
We started by creating a minimal set of capabilities for all of our products (no more than five capabilities per product).
Each product has a “North Star metric” that aligns the team’s efforts within a minimum of a one-year timeline. Each capability then sets goals and metrics to ensure that the team has an understanding of priorities and how we will achieve them.
Next, before creating and prioritizing issues, each capability maintains a backlog of product bets and hypotheses.
- This is used to collect questions, musings, and lightbulb moments that we believe will improve the product, solve a set of customer problems, or open up a new segment of the market.
- Part owners shortlist ideas by selecting a handful of items to develop more confidence on.
- Confidence is gained by discussions around impact, linking to tickets and data, sending surveys, and conducting interviews if needed.
The result is a concrete problem statement, a spectrum of solutions, and outcome projections. When ready, the part owners conclude on a direction and plan an issue to add to the team’s backlog.
When we create new issues - we focus on how these relate to customer-facing parts (RevParts), the “customer segment” the work will most impact, and the derived “proxy metric” to support success criteria. Priorities are derived from this information to understand the reach, impact, and effort required to make this work item’s goal a success.
Now a “project mindset” enables the team to ensure tight execution. We align milestones based on the “child issues” or “tasks” that an individual needs to complete to deliver the functionality, and we create “projects” for larger product deliverables that have cross-organization requirements.
To ensure that project and product mindsets form an iterative pattern, we retrospect not only on what was delivered but also whether it achieved the expected outcomes. By reviewing outputs through the lens of outcomes, teams are empowered to derive insight and propose future investment priorities with an understanding of both internal constraints and customer impact.
At DevRev, our vision is to help create Earth’s most customer-centric companies. Our Build Methodology empowers developers by bringing them closer to the customer and business goals. With DevRev, developers can run their entire business with code and maintain a greater sense of ownership of the inputs and outcomes of their work.
Chapter 06
Support Methodology
DevRev Support Methodology
Our intention is shift the way customer support and success are approached
DevRev Support Methodology
At DevRev, our intention isn’t just to enable a support team, it’s to shift the way customer support and success are approached to benefit the end user, the organization, and the customer support and success team(s).
For this reason, we refer to this part of the platform as PLuG. To quote our co-founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey:
PLuG doesn’t just cover the interaction between an end user and a support agent, it empowers both parties to become active participants in product growth and evolution by integrating it into the broader development ecosystem.
Traditionally, “Support” has been a siloed, a cost center whose primary function was to answer end user inquiries as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, when you bring Dev (engineering) closer to Rev (end users) you empower your customer facing teams like support and customer success to become more active members in the development process, leveraging their unique insights from constant contact with the end user to in turn empower developers with greater context enabling them to make more user centric development decisions leading to both a better outcome for your end user and the developer who can now see the impact of their work more clearly.
The transition to a PLuG centric development model may sound like a big cultural and logistical undertaking however our platform encourages these changes organically. We built this with some key concepts in mind:
- Customer Success/Support are often the only teams your end users interact with directly
- These interactions are some of the richest sources of end user sentiment data you will receive
- Important insights can be gained through deflection activities to help drive growth and adoption
- The Why is just as important as the What and the How to your development team
Rev and Dev Interactions
Your Customer Success/Support teams are often the only teams your end users will interact with directly. Things like marketing campaigns or even survey requests are one sided interactions and aren’t initiated by the end user (Rev).
When a current or potential end user reaches out, this is often a make or break interaction. More than initial discovery of your product, if they have a positive interaction with a knowledgeable Customer Success/Support team you have likely prevented a user from dropping off. If the interaction is tedious and requires multiple reassignments the chance of drop-off increases significantly.
With your PLuG platform built directly into the same platform used by your developers, the information a customer facing team member may need is already available, therefore eliminating the gap between traditional CRMs, user facing knowledge bases, internal facing knowledge bases, and your project/product management tool.
Empowering your customer facing teams with this information not only improves CSAT by reducing the time it takes to get an answer, but reduces costs associated with a multi level support group.
Rev Interactions as Data Sources
Because of the typically isolated nature of a traditional CRM, information from problem tickets may make it to a project management platform, however a huge amount of potentially useful data from individual conversations is never utilized. Things that make it into a problem ticket and then transferred to another platform for Dev are typically only significant issues that troubleshooting can’t fix. But what about the issues that are fixed with some easy troubleshooting steps? Just because they’re simple to fix does not necessarily mean that they can’t be prevented from happening at all. But without this information in a ticket forwarded to Dev, how will they know about a potential improvement?
With all of your data in one place, the possibilities for data driven product improvement are amplified by orders of magnitude. With this data in hand (and a little ML magic), you can do things like deduplicating tickets and ticket clustering with ease. You can also see if your product roadmap matches up with what users are requesting when they write in.
Deflect to Improve
Often when thinking about how to reduce overhead from customer facing teams the default response is automation and deflection. Chat bots, more knowledge base articles, and macros to insert the same paragraph into conversations over and over again. When focusing our efforts on Product Led Growth, however, we should instead be asking, how can we prevent the end user from ever having this question? Every time we need to create an automation to reduce human contact with the user, the question that goes along with it should be how can we heal the underlying wound so the bandage is no longer needed?
In addition to having your end user interaction data all in one place, your customer facing teams also have more context and information to work with putting them in an excellent position to help you answer these questions. With the workspaces unified, they can now become active members in the development process, serving as the voice of the end user so the underlying cause of the question is addressed therefore improving end user experience and removing the need for an automated response altogether.
This happens naturally in the PLuG portion of our platform, allowing customer success teams to surface these types of interactions either manually or automatically without creating documentation debt or consuming additional Dev time.
Giving Dev the Why
Completing a list of tasks can be satisfying in its own way however the work doesn’t carry the same meaning if you don’t understand why you’re doing it. In the shuffle between CRM and project management tool, a lot of context around the work is lost. By using a unified system, this information is readily available alongside the work item.
Giving your developers the context around why they are working on a specific item not only leads to higher job satisfaction with the knowledge that what they’re doing is contributing to the overall goal, but can also lead to better outcomes for your end user as each developer has the information needed to suggest alternative solutions.
Why DevRev PLuG
Simply put, we will help you power a truly customer and dev centric approach to growth by bringing all of your resources together empowering your users and team members to become more active participants in the product development process leading to better solutions and outcomes for Rev and Dev.