Planning a roadmap for developer experience at Paystack: Insights from 200+ African developers

What we’ve learned about developer preferences and communities in Africa, and how it’s shaping our approach to improving developer experience

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Developer experience is the sum of all interactions a developer has with a product, including APIs, SDKs, documentation, content, and community. A good developer experience empowers software engineers, making them feel productive and satisfied throughout their journey with your product.

Paystack’s developer experience is managed by our Developer Relations team. We support software engineers in building custom payment experiences as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We’re always looking to improve how well Paystack works for developers. As part of this effort, we recently conducted a user research exercise, engaging over 200 developers across Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya to better understand their needs.

While we learned a lot about how Paystack can better serve developers, we also discovered broader and surprising takeaways about the challenges African developers are facing.

We hope our findings will be useful to anyone running a similar research process or building technical tools for developers in Africa.

Whether you’re a business aiming to enhance your developer experience or a developer curious about your peers’ experiences, we hope you find this article insightful.

Shareable Takeaway
Developer experience is the sum of all interactions a developer has with a product, which, when positive, boosts their productivity and satisfaction.

Gathering developer insights

We used two methods for this research exercise: one-on-one interviews and a survey.

First, we conducted 15 interviews with developers, exploring various topics, including the types of content they consume, how engineering decisions are made in their organizations, and which developer communities they typically engage with. For those familiar with Paystack, we aimed to understand how they interacted with our tools and what improvements they’d like to see.

Next, we shared a survey with subscribers of our developer newsletter, receiving 194 responses from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa.

The survey contained more detailed questions than those asked during the interviews, allowing us to analyze the demographic breakdown of our developer community and gather even more in-depth feedback on their experiences with Paystack’s developer tools.

Here are a few takeaways from our research:

Senior African developers are hungry for more advanced technical content

Senior developers shared that they struggle to find technical content on complex topics. While there is plenty of beginner content for junior developers, those with over four years of experience noted that many tutorials, blog posts, and panels are geared toward less advanced topics.

Informal conversations with developers and engineering organizations indicate that Africa’s tech ecosystem has a high proportion of junior developers. Our survey results support this: 46% of respondents had 0-3 years of experience, compared to 25% with 3-5 years, and 26% with over 5 years.

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Years of experience in software development

As a result, content is often geared toward simpler, entry-level information, creating a gap for experienced developers seeking to advance their skills.

This presents a significant opportunity to serve senior developers with advanced technical content that meets their needs.

Engineering leaders in Africa are struggling to recruit senior talent

Another theme that emerged from our research is the challenge of finding experienced developers locally. Leaders of engineering teams shared that, due to the large pool of junior developers, most applicants for their open positions lack the level of experience required.

This situation presents a catch-22 for the local developer ecosystem: junior developers need jobs to gain experience, but many available positions require experience they haven’t yet acquired.

This highlights the need to find new ways to help junior developers build the skills and experience necessary to grow into the senior talent our ecosystem needs to thrive.

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African developers are seeking community

Community is important in the personal and professional growth of software engineers. Being part of active developer communities accelerates skill development by enabling knowledge-sharing among peers. However, we found that many developers are missing out on these benefits.

54% of our respondents noted that they aren’t active in any developer groups but would like to be part of one. This indicates either a lack of sufficient communities for developers to join or that existing communities are not visible enough for developers to find.

We also found that community needs vary depending on a developer’s career stage and role. More senior engineers cited groups of peers, coworkers, and mentors as their primary form of community. These communities mainly serve as spaces to vet potential service providers, discuss investors, and share experiences.

Junior developers, on the other hand, prefer large conferences and panels where they can meet like-minded individuals, learn from talks, and visit sponsor booths for cool merch and hiring opportunities.

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Membership within developer communities

What developers think about Paystack's developer experience

Our research explored developers’ experiences with Paystack tools and resources, as well as their feedback on the overall developer experience.

We were glad to hear how frequently developers shared that they really liked Paystack’s Developer Documentation. They appreciated seeing several code snippets for both basic integrations and advanced use cases. The clear, comprehensive documentation allows developers to integrate much more quickly than they expected, without needing to follow up frequently with our support team.

However, they also provided constructive feedback on how we could improve the developer experience. Some developers were unaware of many resources available, such as the Paystack CLI and official SDKs, while others needed better documentation to understand how to maximize the use of those tools.

Others shared that, while Paystack’s Developer Documentation did a great job covering payment flows (e.g., how to collect a transaction), the documentation could be improved for post-payment flows, such as API-driven ways to handle disputes and refunds. Finally, developers in South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana wanted Paystack to play a much more visible and active role in their local developer ecosystems.

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Familiarity with Paystack's developer resources

This feedback helped us understand how to approach developer experience across multiple markets, as well as identify the gaps we need to fill to better support developers in their integration journey.

Using developer personas to improve developer experience

To translate our research into actionable strategies, we created three developer personas. These are archetypes of the broad categories of developers we encountered during our interviews and validated with survey data.

Each persona — The Learner, The Journeyman, and The Manager — has unique goals, challenges, and behaviors:

  • The Learner: An entry-level developer focused on upskilling and gaining recognition in the tech community. They need beginner-focused content, easy-to-follow documentation, and active communities for support and networking.
  • The Journeyman: A mid-level developer aiming to advance in their career, possibly toward engineering management or starting a company. They seek advanced technical content, growth-focused events, and opportunities to contribute to the developer community.
  • The Manager: A senior engineer, like a CTO or VP, focused on scaling technology, optimizing performance, and building strong teams. They are driven by high-level business objectives and the need to attract and retain top talent.

These personas serve as decision-making tools to guide our interactions with developers. For example, we use them to plan content and inform our event strategies, ensuring we meet the varied needs of each archetype.

In June, we partnered with AWS to host a CTO Roundtable in Lagos, Nigeria, using the Manager persona to shape the event’s structure and content. We brought CTOs, VPs, and other technical leaders together for a highly tactical discussion about how to scale AWS use while keeping costs low.

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CTOs and VPs at Paystack's CTO Roundtable in June 2024

The personas aren’t static; as our product evolves and we engage with more developers, we may discover new personas or need to update existing ones. The key is to keep engaging with our developers and refining these profiles over time.

Evaluating developer experience with the Developer Journey Map

A concept that really helped us while working on this project was the idea of the Developer Journey Map.

This is a simple visualization of the stages that a developer goes through to find success with a developer tool: from Discovery, to Evaluation, to Learning, to Building, and finally, to Scaling.

The Journey Map was created by James Parton and Caroline Lewko and is mentioned in Developer Relations: How to Build and Grow a Successful Developer Relations Program, a resource we’ve found invaluable.

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The Developer Journey Map by James Parton and Caroline Lewko

Imagining ourselves as each of the three personas, we mapped the potential journey each could take through these five stages. At each stage, we examined our existing resources, identified gaps, and assessed how well our developer touchpoints were working.

If you’re looking to improve your own developer experience, I strongly encourage you to assess your processes against the Developer Journey Map. It’s a simple but powerful way to identify potential points of friction and opportunities for improvement.

Key areas we’re focused on to further improve the Paystack developer experience

Our research helped us understand meaningful ways we could better support developers looking to integrate Paystack. But insights are just the beginning — the exciting part is putting these learnings into action.

Here are some key areas we’re focusing on:

Upgrading our developer tools

We’ve already kickstarted this by updating our official Node.js and Python libraries and releasing new SDKs for Android and iOS development.

Alongside these updates, we are creating more comprehensive help content and tutorials to guide developers in using these tools effectively.

Engaging more with developer communities in expansion markets

We’re actively seeking more opportunities to engage with developers in markets like Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. This includes participating in local tech events, partnering with developer communities to host meetups, and creating region-specific content that addresses the unique needs and challenges of each market.

This year, we’ve already initiated some of these efforts by hosting developer meetups in Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi. We also sponsored DevConf ZA, South Africa’s largest community-run conference for software developers, and we’re proud sponsors of this year’s GirlCode ZA annual hackathon for women and girls in tech in South Africa.

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Paystack at DevConf ZA in South Africa

Further improvements to the Paystack Developer Documentation

It’s really important to us that the Paystack Developer Documentation is the best it can be. We’re always trying to find ways to improve and ensure that developers using our APIs have all the information and resources they need to build with Paystack.

Making sure our docs are comprehensive and easy to follow means a lot to us. From refining our documentation process to improving the platform that hosts our docs, we’re constantly looking for ways to enhance the experience for developers working with our APIs.

Recently, we expanded our content with updates to our Transfers and Bulk Charge documentation. We also introduced a new Developer Tools section to house documentation on tools like the new Android and iOS SDKs and Inline JS v2. Additionally, our API reference now includes several of the most common API errors that developers encounter, along with guidance on how to resolve them.

Currently, we’re focused on further improving our Developer Documentation to make information even easier to find and understand. This includes reorganizing our content structure, adding more code examples, clearly linking to available developer tools and resources, and creating more intuitive navigation paths for developers at different stages of their journey.

In the longer term, we’re working on a complete OpenAPI spec for the Paystack API. This will enable several exciting improvements. We’ll be able to automate the generation of API references, ensuring that the documentation perfectly reflects what’s on the production API. The OpenAPI spec file will also allow us to quickly generate other tools and resources, like SDKs and Postman Collections. All of these improvements will help developers integrate with Paystack more quickly and without issues.

Let’s talk Developer Relations and developer experience in Africa

While these are our key focus areas right now, they are not all we’ll do. This research exercise wasn’t a one-off event, and we expect that as we talk to more developers, their feedback will continue to shape our roadmap.

Our goal is to create a developer experience that not only meets current needs but also anticipates future ones. We’re excited about the road ahead and look forward to growing and evolving alongside our developer community.

We hope this article has helped illuminate how we think about developer experience at Paystack. We also hope that our research methodology and results provided some guidance on how to engage technical users at your startup.

If you have any thoughts or ideas on how we can improve developer experience at Paystack, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at [email protected]. I lead the Developer Relations team at Paystack, and look forward to hearing from you!

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