How to Win a Developer Ecosystem from Zero

The Myth of Feature Completeness

Most platform teams believe they need to ship a comprehensive feature set before developers will adopt. They spend months building flexible abstractions, configurable pipelines, and extensive documentation — then launch to crickets.

The truth is simpler and more uncomfortable: developers evaluate your platform in the first 60 minutes. If they can't build something real in that window, they're gone. No amount of documentation or feature breadth will bring them back.

I've now built developer platforms at two companies — the Teams AI SDK at Microsoft (0 → 10K+ developers) and Zoom's Chat AI agent platform. The pattern is the same both times.

Time-to-First-Value Is the Only Metric That Matters

When we launched the Teams AI SDK, we obsessed over one number: how long does it take a developer to go from npm install to a working agent? The answer needed to be under 30 minutes.

Everything else — extensibility, advanced features, enterprise controls — came second. Not because those things don't matter, but because they're irrelevant if nobody gets past the first hour.

We built CLI scaffolding that generated a fully working agent project in one command. Pre-configured auth. Pre-wired Azure OpenAI connection. A sample that actually did something useful out of the box. That single investment drove more adoption than every other feature combined.

Opinionated Defaults Beat Flexible Frameworks

Platform teams love flexibility. "Let developers choose their own architecture." "Don't be prescriptive." This sounds reasonable and is almost always wrong.

Developers don't want to make 15 architectural decisions before writing their first line of business logic. They want strong defaults that work, with escape hatches for when they need them.

The Teams AI SDK baked in opinions about memory management, prompt structure, tool registration, and safety guardrails. Developers who wanted to customize could override any of it. But the 90% who just wanted to build an agent never had to think about it.

The competing approach — expose low-level primitives and let developers compose — lost. Not because it was technically worse, but because it required too much upfront investment from developers who hadn't yet decided to commit to the platform.

Trust Through Templates, Not Docs

Documentation is necessary but insufficient. The highest-performing onboarding asset we shipped wasn't a getting-started guide — it was a set of templates that developers could clone, modify, and deploy.

Templates work because developers learn by reading and modifying working code. They don't learn by reading prose about how code should work. A template says "here's a real thing that works, change it to do what you need." Documentation says "here's how to build something from scratch, good luck."

We shipped 20+ templates covering common patterns: FAQ bots, meeting assistants, workflow automators, data lookup agents. Each one was a complete, deployable project. Developers could go from template to production in an afternoon.

The Ecosystem Flywheel

Once you have developers building on your platform, the flywheel kicks in:

1. More developers → more agents in the marketplace
2. More agents → more value for end users
3. More end-user value → more platform investment from leadership
4. More investment → better developer experience
5. Repeat

The hardest part is getting the flywheel started. That's why time-to-first-value matters so much — it's the spark that starts the loop.

The Playbook

If you're building a developer platform from zero:

1. Measure time-to-first-value and make it your north star
2. Ship opinionated defaults with escape hatches, not flexible primitives
3. Build templates, not just documentation
4. Make the first experience magical — invest disproportionately in onboarding
5. Earn the keynote — wrap your platform in a narrative that leadership can champion

The developers will come for the DX. They'll stay for the ecosystem. But they have to get through that first hour.