Crawl, Walk, and Run: A model to help developers win inside your product
Originally published on August 16, 2026.
Developers don’t care about your product. Period.
It’s the humbling truth. Let that be your starting point. They stumble onto your product with different motivations sparked by a triggering moment. What happens after that lies in your control, albeit with limits.
One way to improve your odds of winning them is to take a ‘cradle to grave’ view of the developer within your product. You’ve got to play the role of an invisible benefactor so they care about your product visibly. That’s where the model of crawl, walk, and run comes into play!
Picture a developer who’s trying to develop a third-party app within any ecosystem. You name it: Apple, HubSpot, or Shopify for the sake of this example. Here’s how a developer thinks and matures across each stage.
CRAWL: The ‘get to first success’ stage
The Developer Mindset
They want to feel confident in your product. They’re evaluating whether your product is worth their time and if they can build anything at all with it.
Your Guiding Principles
Spotlight the golden path you want them to follow. Better yet, line it up with floodlights. Doesn’t matter if this said path is imperfect. You can highlight scenarios where it’ll fall short and offer off-ramps as you see fit.
Compress the setup time and work intentionally! You can never escape certain foundational steps, and that’s understandable. But recognize that a never-ending setup isn’t the primary reason someone lands in your product.
Show them visible proof. Design your quickstart guides to lead the developer into an actual result within your product. Don’t leave them with a successful blank page.
Shape their actions around intent. You may want to show off your product but resist that urge. Don’t bore them with your architectural genius. Enable them to discover that you solve a problem they care about.
Design for the developer first. Consider the most popular dev tools and their design patterns. What’s worth bringing over? Now for the AI angle: how does your product work with their AI tools?
Minimum Resources That Matter
Developer Docs. Quick Start Guides. FAQs. Code Samples. Starter Repos. Short Tutorials. Use Case Pages.
Real World Examples
Shopify Dev Docs: pathways into their ecosystem
Scaffold an App Tutorial: scaffolding guidelines with clear next steps
Shopify AI Toolkit: adapting to a developer’s AI-assisted workflows
The developers graduate to the next stage when you’re able to help them get to ‘first success’ in the least ambiguous way possible.
WALK: The ‘get to first value’ stage
The Developer Mindset
They want to know what they’re building has some value. They’re deciding whether they can turn it into something someone will use someday.
Your Guiding Principles
Get them close to reality. Give the developers an opportunity to test their creation in a realistic environment like a sandbox. You need to play the role of an enabler, helping simulate the user’s world as close as possible to real scenarios.
Showcase successful references. A reference doc tells a developer what’s technically possible. You’ve got to lean on examples, recipes, and reference implementations to show what useful looks like.
Share pieces of your product experience. Don’t just offer developers the tools to build on your product. Allow them to take advantage of building blocks (for example, a UI library) that help create something that behaves like part of your product.
Comfort them along potential failure points. Identify debugging tools and ways to escalate help issues for your developers. Direct them to resources like support, community channels like Slack, Discord, any dedicated DevRel program, and more.
Don’t let them noodle on. It’s easy for the developers to slack off at this stage. Add urgency to them by gently nudging that the task is not over. Challenge them to continue their work and connect what they’re building to some user outcome.
Minimum Resources That Matter
Sandbox. Extensions. Test Environments. Reference Guides. Reference Apps. Changelogs. Community Channels. Troubleshooting Documentation.
Real World Examples
Shopify Dev Stores: realistic environments to build and test apps
Shopify App Surfaces: areas where apps can appear inside the product
Shopify App Extensions: how devs can add functionality inside Shopify workflows
Developers finally make it to the last stage, when you guide them to go beyond a simple working integration and turn it into a meaningful user outcome.
RUN: The ‘ramp it all up’ stage
The Developer Mindset
They want to know what they’ve created is valuable at scale, like more users, more capabilities, more performance targets, etc. They desire to see if they can build a durable product or business on top of your offering.
Your Guiding Principles
Morph your product into a distribution channel. One measure of success in this stage is if you’re seeing a surge of apps from developers. An equally crucial task here is to let the ecosystem help users discover the most useful apps.
Reward good ecosystem behavior. You have to play the role of quality police for your product. Systematically make a case for quality leading to monetary benefits. Quality programs, certifications, featured placements all play a role here.
Cut down on maintenance. Your relationship with the developer doesn’t stop after a milestone. Your product accumulates tech debt and dependencies over time. Assist your developers to migrate, upgrade, and stay current. Make it easy for your developers to carry the boxes if you’re forcing them to move!
Give them visibility into their business. Consider a performance dashboard for every developer. Reveal their metrics readily to them: think usage, adoption, retention, churn, reviews, performance, and more.
Entertain a path from participant to partner. A mature developer in your ecosystem carries a lot of value. Nudge them gently at first to explore community contributor roles. Craft a healthy pipeline to ambassador, co-marketing, advisory, and partner roles.
Showcase what’s possible. We’re talking case studies, but don’t see them as vain success stories; see them as proof for what you’re preaching. Structure your dev stories in this flow: Challenge → Opportunity: What & How They Built It → Results → What Other Devs Can Emulate.
Minimum Resources That Matter
Dev Success Stories. SLAs. DevRel Support. Ecosystem Participation Programs & Opportunities: Feedback, Contribution, Co-Marketing, Partner, Ambassador, Certification. Analytics. Product Roadmap.
Real World Examples
SupaEasy, Checkout Buddy: examples of Shopify’s 3rd party dev success stories
Built for Shopify: a program for apps that meet Shopify’s quality bar
You’ve hopefully set up the developers for continual success with advantages they wouldn’t be able to tap into without your help! The best product ecosystems gradually turn the consumers into their contributors.
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