Observations
How to Create Technical Content That Engineers Will Respect (and Read)
Your team has published a new blog post. “How Our Big Data Architecture Is Transforming the Industry.” You share the link in the general chat. Five minutes later, you see the link appear in the internal developers’ chat, followed by a string of sarcastic comments and 🤦 emojis.
Familiar situation? This is when marketing, trying to help, damages its own reputation within the company and loses the trust of its most valuable audience: technical specialists.
The problem isn’t that you have “bad” copywriters or “mean” developers. The problem lies in the approach itself. When a marketer who is not a subject matter expert tries to write in-depth technical content “based on” something, it is almost always destined to fail. A technical audience instantly detects falsehoods, inaccurate terminology, and a shallow understanding.
To create content that developers will respect and read, marketing must change its role radically: stop being the author and become the producer. Your job is not to write about engineers but to build a system that helps them share their knowledge with the world.
In this article, we will break down four key principles of this “producer” approach. These principles will help you develop a process for creating technically flawless content that attracts the right audience and, equally importantly, makes your tech team proud, not embarrassed.
The Engineer, Not the Copywriter, Is the Source of Truth
In the traditional content creation model, the CMO assigns a copywriter to “write an article about Kubernetes.” Even a very talented copywriter goes to Google, reads three to five other articles, and tries to compile and rewrite them. Or they ask ChatGPT. The result is a superficial, derivative text with no depth or real experience. This is exactly what causes the facepalm.
The “producer” approach changes this process from the ground up. Rather than relying on Google, the source of content is an internal expert — your engineer, architect, or team lead. The marketer (or technical writer) acts as an interviewer and producer.
What does this look like in practice? Instead of a brief, the marketer comes to the engineer with a recorder. They say: “Hi, I know you recently solved a complex database migration issue. “Explain it to me as if I don’t understand anything.” Why did the problem arise? What options did you consider? Why did you choose this one? What pitfalls did you encounter?”
At this stage, the marketer’s task is to ask “stupid” questions and be the voice of the future reader, extracting every detail from the expert. Then, the marketer transcribes the hour-long recording, removes unnecessary information, builds a logical structure, adds clear analogies, and selects illustrations. The completed draft is returned to the engineer for final proofreading and approval — the technical review.
What do we get as a result? Authentic, in-depth content based on your company’s unique experience. Your engineer only spent an hour or so of their time instead of struggling for days over a blank page. The marketer applied their main superpower of structuring and packaging information into a clear, reader-friendly format. It’s a symbiotic relationship in which everyone wins.
Usefulness over creativity. Show the code
Developers are pragmatists. They read content not for entertainment, but to solve concrete work problems. This is why every article you publish must be a useful tool above all else, not a “creative piece.”
Superficial articles like “5 DevOps Trends” will only evoke boredom. Your audience values depth and practicality. The most successful formats are those that help people do their jobs:
Postmortems. Don’t be afraid to write about your mistakes. A candid story about what broke, why it happened, and the lessons you learned will earn you enormous respect and trust.
Tutorials and step-by-step guides. Show how to solve a real task using your product or technology. Provide ready-made code snippets that can be copied. This is the highest form of usefulness.
Architectural deep dives. Explain the reasoning behind specific technical decisions. What alternatives did you consider? What trade-offs were involved? This demonstrates the depth of your thinking.
Accuracy over hype. Speak their language
A technical audience has a built-in “falsehood detector.” The fastest way to trigger it is to use imprecise terminology or marketing clichés. Phrases like “our innovative, breakthrough solution” are a red flag.
If you write about a database without specifying the type (relational, NoSQL, or time-series), you lose credibility. Promising “real-time” performance but delivering 5-second delays will also cause you to lose credibility. In the world of engineering, accuracy is a form of respect.
There is only one solution, and it is non-negotiable: a mandatory technical review. No technical article should be published without final approval from the expert engineer who provided the information. Their task is to eliminate inaccuracies and ensure the use of correct terminology.
Transparency > selling. Acknowledge the trade-offs
Traditional marketing teaches us to emphasize strengths and hide weaknesses. For a technical audience, however, this approach is counterproductive. Engineers know that there is no such thing as a “silver bullet,” and that every technology is a set of trade-offs.
If you pretend your product is perfect, you simply appear dishonest or inexperienced. The most powerful way to earn trust is transparency.
Don’t be afraid to discuss trade-offs. For example, you could say, “We chose architecture X because it gives us incredible performance. The downside is a higher entry barrier for new developers. Here’s how we mitigate this with our onboarding system.” This type of honest conversation instantly establishes you as a mature and confident team member that others want to work with.
Marketing as a Production Center for Experts
The formula for earning the respect of content developers is simple: provide expertise from engineers, focus on usefulness and technical accuracy, and be honest about trade-offs.
As you can see, the CMO’s role in this process is not to write content. Rather, their task is to build a company-wide system for extracting, packaging, and distributing internal expertise.
Pick one engineer on your team who enjoys sharing knowledge. Ask them to tell you about the most interesting technical problem they solved last month. Your job isn’t to write the article for them, but rather to help them tell that story. Save this article as an instruction for this process.
