Higher versus lower order thinking with Wesley Faulkner
Wesley Faulkner's team once had a manager tell him to copy-paste a Black Friday promo into forums with zero prior relationship. It didn't just fail — it made people actively distrust the brand. His fix on a later campaign: paying a cartoonist to put customers' own kids on their free t-shirts, so people actually wanted to wear them.
Wesley Faulkner is senior community manager at AWS, co-host of the Community Pulse podcast, and previously worked in community and DevRel roles at SingleStore, AMD, and Atlassian.
We get into the tweet that sparked this conversation — that reaching developers requires understanding they're constantly practicing higher-order, multi-layered thinking — why a personalized t-shirt giveaway wildly outperformed a generic one, why developers instinctively distrust any product claim without an explanation of the mechanism behind it, and how to justify long-term brand investment when a startup needs signups now.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
What was the idea behind your tweet on higher-order thinking and reaching developers?
It came out of two conversations merging together — one with a friend about where DevRel is heading, where philosophical, big-picture thinkers get pushed to distill their approach into concrete tactics and steps; the other with someone brand new to DevRel struggling to explain the discipline to leadership who'd asked them to just execute a strategy. Developers spend at least eight hours a day solving problems that require holding a multifaceted set of concerns in mind at once — scaling, user experience, data storage, compliance, maintenance. That's a genuinely different kind of thinking than a single, isolated concern. If someone's basic needs aren't met — can they feed themselves, do they feel safe, do they feel accepted — that impairs their ability to engage in that higher-order thinking at all. To reach developers effectively, you have to meet them at that same level, focusing on how what you're offering actually serves the people using your software, rather than assuming a superficial incentive will land.
Can you give a concrete example of higher-order versus lower-order marketing in practice?
Higher-order thinking is relationship-driven and happens over multiple engagements rather than a single transactional ask — instead of walking up and saying 'buy my product,' you ask what someone's actually struggling with, and it might take several exchanges to refine your message to where it actually fits their need. Early in my career, a manager told me to copy-paste a Black Friday promotion into a bunch of forums we had zero prior relationship with — pure spam. That doesn't just fail to convert, it actively creates negative associations with your brand that follow you afterward, because it was entirely one-directional with no relationship behind it.
What's an example that went the other way — something that actually connected with people?
We did a t-shirt giveaway, which sounds completely ordinary, but we hired a cartoon artist to personalize each shirt with an illustration of the recipient, or their kids, or their family. Instead of something that gets shoved in a drawer and never worn, it became something people were genuinely proud to wear, because it represented them personally, not just the company logo. It cost us relatively little — about $200 an hour for the artist, a great rate for them — but it created both a personalized experience and a visible spectacle, a line of people wanting one, which drove real organic interest. That's higher-order thinking in practice: it's not necessarily about spending more money, it's about genuinely incorporating what someone actually wants and is proud of into what you're already planning to do.
You've mentioned that companies often try to copy a competitor's successful campaign and get disappointed when it doesn't work the same way. Why does that happen?
There's real customization behind the delivery that isn't visible from the outside. If Company A gives away a Nintendo Switch and it goes wildly well, Company B might copy that surface idea without seeing the packaging, the prior audience research about what their users actually wanted, or an earlier campaign that built toward it. When you copy someone else's visible output without doing the same underlying groundwork, you can't expect the same result — the sweat equity behind it is invisible.
How does developers' habit of wanting to understand exactly how something works shape how you should talk to them?
Developers spend their working lives taking apart code they've often never seen before, figuring out what a block is meant to do, what it needs as input, and where its output goes — hour after hour, year after year, that trains a very specific way of thinking that inevitably bleeds into how they evaluate everything else, including marketing claims. When you say you're 'the fastest' or 'the best,' a developer's instinct is to immediately ask how you're measuring that, and by what method. It's the same instinct that makes someone reverse-engineer a movie trailer to guess which character is secretly the villain — developers draw the lines backward and forward to understand how things actually connect, rather than accepting a claim at face value.
You used an analogy about a potion that makes you taller. Can you explain that?
If someone offered you a potion that makes you taller, you'd naturally want to know the mechanism — does it stretch your bones, does it just thicken the soles of your feet? You wouldn't just accept 'it makes you taller' without understanding how. That instinct to understand the actual mechanism behind any substantial-sounding claim is exactly what you're up against with a developer audience, and ignoring it in your messaging tends to backfire.
This kind of long-term, relationship-driven approach sounds slower to pay off. How do you justify that investment when a startup needs signups quickly?
You can actually do both simultaneously, just through different channels. A talk about, say, working more efficiently in teams or how inclusion affects team performance reaches far more people, because it's broadly relevant, than a narrow talk about deploying a .NET application for one specific enterprise use case. But you can build on that broader philosophy layer with a concrete example — here's how we applied this idea, here's the actual codebase, here's how you can use the same approach to save time in your own deployments. Establishing that broader, 'stickiness' layer doesn't mean the payoff has to wait until the very end.
Is that kind of impact even measurable, if it doesn't show up as a direct signup click?
Not always in a way that's obviously attributable — that's why you see a name on a conference lanyard with no link attached. The awareness factor is a real part of someone's eventual decision, even if it's invisible in your analytics. I've given talks completely unrelated to a specific product pitch where someone came up afterward and said they'd never heard of the company but were going to check it out. If you ask people why they like a product, a lot of the time the honest answer is just 'it seems to work' or 'it gives me a good experience' — a residual feeling built up from exactly these kinds of indirect touchpoints. People may not remember exactly what you told them, but they'll remember how you made them feel, and that's genuinely what you should be optimizing for.