Twilio
Twilio Developer Hub: from planned retirement to renewed developer engagement
Twilio · Developer experience, content strategy, and cross-functional leadership
I led the redevelopment of a developer property scheduled for retirement into Twilio’s Developer Hub: a curated destination for discovering, understanding, and building with Twilio APIs.
Outcome
1,930% year-over-year growth in signup intents
The opportunity
Before the redesign, the property averaged approximately 200 visitors a month and was set to be sunset. I saw more potential in it.
Twilio had valuable developer resources across tutorials, documentation, code samples, videos, training, and community programs. My vision was to bring those resources into one curated experience that helped developers find a useful starting point and understand what they could build next.
The audience included developers evaluating Twilio, learning its APIs, and exploring additional products and use cases.
What I owned
As Director of Developer Content, I set the strategic vision, brought marketing stakeholders into the process, and organized my team around a new content model.
My team and I built the UI in-house and partnered with the Web Team on brand consistency and development of the redesigned property.
The decisions behind the work
Make the Hub a shared destination.
I met with stakeholders across marketing to understand their priorities and establish their participation in the new vision. The Hub could connect developer education with product initiatives, campaigns, and community opportunities.
Create a reason to return each month.
I organized my team to propose a 12-month editorial plan with a curated theme each month. The experience brought together a talking-head explainer video, relevant technical tutorials, code samples, documentation, events, webinars, community news, startup resources, and on-demand training.
This gave the property a repeatable publishing model and a clear focus for each edition.
Extend the value of each theme.
I proposed converting previous monthly themes into evergreen resources for demand generation and campaigns. That gave each edition a useful life beyond its featured month. By January 2026, campaigns had already planned to reuse the existing ConversationRelay theme.
Build within our available resources.
We completed the redevelopment using existing team capacity and our partnership with Web. Delivering without additional budget required aligning the vision, content plan, and implementation across the people already supporting the work.
The results
More than a year after the relaunch, Developer Hub showed substantial growth in developer signup intent.
| Measure | Reported result |
|---|---|
| May 2026 signup intents | Up 1,930% year over year |
| May 2026 signup-intent conversion rate | 7%, up 250% relative to the previous year |
| March 2026 reach | 40,738 total views |
| March 2026 signup intents | 1,381 |
| Redevelopment | Five months, without additional budget |
These are property-level results from internal reporting. Signup intents indicate movement toward registration; they are not equivalent to completed registrations, activated accounts, or paying customers.
How the program evolved
After relaunch, we continued refining the experience through monthly editions, template improvements, and video updates.
We also used performance signals to guide the conversation about what developers needed. RCS repeatedly appeared as the Hub’s leading topic, with ConversationRelay gaining interest later. I continued to author a weekly report that examined traffic, signup intent, conversion, and new-user participation.
As discovery shifted toward AI answer engines and off-platform communities, I proposed a further evolution: positioning the Hub as Twilio’s canonical source of developer knowledge. That strategy prioritized real developer questions, reusable content, and measurement across human and AI-driven discovery.
What I learned
Bring platform partners into the research earlier.
My quarterly reflection identified a need to involve Web earlier so we could surface restrictions and overlapping work before implementation. We planned a biweekly Web–Docs–Content sync, and subsequent collaboration helped us choose a shared content structure instead of developing a separate solution.
Evaluate traffic and conversion together.
One May update showed traffic declining while signup-intent conversion held steady. Later, traffic increased while conversion softened. Those patterns reinforced the need to understand who was arriving and what they did next, rather than treating more traffic as sufficient evidence of success.
Design the operating model alongside the experience.
The monthly themes, stakeholder participation, and evergreen reuse gave the redesigned property a way to keep delivering value. The work extended beyond launching a new interface into sustaining a developer-facing program.