In today’s complex tech landscape, effectively engaging with engineers and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) requires a nuanced approach that goes beyond traditional marketing tactics. It’s not just about speaking their language; it’s about earning their trust. In a recent interview, Erza Zylfijaj, Marketing Program Manager at Nobl9, shared profound insights on how modern marketing teams can achieve this, drawing lessons from building global events like SLOconf and the transformative power of Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

The Challenge of Marketing to Technical Audiences

Erza Zylfijaj highlights that technical audiences are inherently skeptical of vague and overhyped messaging. “Engineers don’t respond to hype or vague claims. They want clarity, substance, and proof,” she explains. The key challenge lies in finding the right tone and format that respects their time and intelligence without oversimplifying complex topics. Zylfijaj has learned to move away from “flashy marketing” and instead focus on real use cases, open conversations, and community-led content, which has proven far more effective.

A critical distinction Zylfijaj emphasizes is that while engineers want to buy, they don’t want to be sold to. This means marketing efforts must lead with empathy, focusing on solving their problems rather than just promoting a product. Individualizing marketing efforts to understand the specific needs of each persona is crucial, especially in an era where AI can generate abundant, yet often generic, content. The “personal touch” is more important than ever to stand out.

The Power of Community: Lessons from SLOconf

Building trust in the SRE world is achieved through effective tools, supportive communities, and meaningful metrics. Zylfijaj points to SLOconf as a prime example of successful community building. Launched in 2021, SLOconf became one of the largest conferences dedicated to SLOs, built entirely on organic marketing.

Zylfijaj notes that “community isn’t about content necessarily. It’s about trust”. For SLOconf, this meant inviting participants to “co-create, speak and lead together,” making it feel less like a vendor event and more like a “grassroots movement”. This approach resonated with engineers who appreciate genuine, education-driven content over promotional material. The timing also played a role, as the 2021 lockdown created a strong craving for connection within the community. The virtual format allowed for a wider audience, revealing the significant need for engineering communities to discuss SLOs.

SLOs: Transforming Reliability Practices

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are defined as reliability goals based on actual user needs. Instead of reacting to every alert, SLOs enable teams to focus on critical services, ensuring they remain fast and available. Zylfijaj explains that SLOs are vital not just for engineers but for entire organizations, as reliable services lead to satisfied customers and happy teams.

Modern systems are too complex for simple uptime metrics to tell the whole story. SLOs provide a way for teams to define what “good reliability” truly means for their users and to understand acceptable risk levels. This shift allows teams to move from a reactive “firefighting mode” to more strategic, business-aligned decisions.

Zylfijaj shares a powerful example of an organization that used SLOs to pause future development for an entire quarter. By leveraging clear SLO data, they identified areas of real risk and, by tightening objectives on critical services, reduced severe incidents by over 40% in just two months. This transition from “gut feel to data-backed decisions” is a direct benefit of adopting SLOs.

Building Trust and Engagement the Right Way

For marketing professionals targeting technical audiences, Zylfijaj’s advice is clear: “Lead with empathy and not ego”. Understanding the engineers’ world—their pressures, workflows, and tools—is paramount. Rather than selling, engage in conversations. The power of useful content, such as blogs, webinars, and interviews, cannot be underestimated; if you help them solve a problem, they will seek you out.

While leveraging AI for marketing is beneficial, Zylfijaj cautions against letting it dominate the strategy. AI should be a tool for organization and communication, but “core communication” should come from people, as authenticity resonates more with audiences.

To truly speak the language of engineers, Zylfijaj recommends collaborating closely with internal engineering teams. Running marketing content by technical experts for feedback, amplifying their voices, and being curious and respectful of their world are crucial steps. The goal is to avoid fluff and focus on solving real problems, even if it’s “easier said than done”. A/B testing marketing messages with technical audiences can also help refine the approach. By expanding marketing efforts beyond a closed circle and integrating engineering insights, teams can effectively build trust and engagement within technical communities.

Transcript

Swapnil Bhartiya: Marketing to engineers is not that easy, because it’s not just about speaking their language. It’s about earning their trust. And in the world of Site Reliability Engineering, trust is built through tools that work, communities that support, and metrics that matter. Today, I’m joined by Erza Zylfijaj, Marketing Program Manager at Nobl9, to talk about how SLOs are transforming the reliability space, what it really takes to engage technical audience, and what she has learned from building one of the industry’s most respected communities, SLOconf. Erza, it’s great to have you on the show.

Erza Zylfijaj: Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Let’s start with the audience. Since you are a marketing program manager for SREs and engineers, what are some of the unique challenges you have encountered when you try to market to this community?

Erza Zylfijaj: That’s a great question, and I actually was on a webinar last week when we discussed this specific question, so I’m glad you asked me. But I would say something to keep in mind is that technical audiences are highly skeptical of vague and overhyped messaging. Engineers don’t respond to hype, right, or vague claims. They want clarity, substance, and proof. And for me, that’s meant one challenge for me has been finding the right tone and format that respects their time, their intelligence, and without dumbing things down. So for example, a lot of things and a lot of marketing trends that I see that work very well for B2C audiences, or even audiences that are outside of the reliability and SLO community, might not work as well for us. So that’s something that I’ve had to learn, not the hard way, just more in a strategic way, trying to move away from flashy marketing and focusing more on real use cases, open conversations, and community-led content. That’s something that I’ve seen work pretty well throughout the years.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I think what you just shared is not just specific to SREs or platform engineers or this specific discipline. I think that applies to every discipline. If you are, if you don’t speak the language that developers or engineers talk, if you don’t use the same jargon, even for media people, you know, we have to look at what kind of, when I am doing a show about developers, that tone has to change. So can you also talk about, it’s not specific to just SREs, but this should be the approach for any marketing folk who is targeting these sort of communities?

Erza Zylfijaj: One of my favorite quotes that I write about this actually is because there’s this misconception, and I will get to it soon why I think it’s a misconception, where people say that engineers don’t want to buy. Engineers do want to buy. They don’t want to be sold to. So I think learning that difference, where you’re approaching an engineering community, when you want to tell them what solution you’re selling, you’re trying to sell to them, you need to lead with empathy and not with, like we talked again, flashy marketing, and not with, not with just bragging about yourself and talking about yourself, because people don’t want to hear how good you are. People want to hear what you’re solving for them. What issues are you and your team helping them overcome? One thing that I think is, that I know is very important to keep in mind, is that just because you’re selling a product that could be applied to different companies and to different, meeting different needs for them, not every company is going to have the same need or the same approach that you should, you should take from a marketing point of view. So spending some time and individualizing your marketing, understanding what the current needs are to your specific persona, is going to make you stand out. And especially now with the world of AI, where, you know, everyone can write a good marketing email, right? What I learned in school when I got my masters three years ago, right now, it’s not even applicable sometimes, because AI has really changed the way we do marketing and especially the way we approach people. So I think keeping that personal touch, especially now, is more important than ever, because everyone wakes up and they have over 500 emails all of a sudden in their inbox, because it’s, it’s easier to optimize marketing now, but to stand out is what’s difficult. And I think that’s where you have to spend time with your team, understand who you’re talking to and what you’re solving for them, and make it simple. Don’t overcomplicate it.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Such great insights. It’s gonna help a lot of other marketing folks as well. Now, as you said, you know, talk to the team, but I feel that this job also requires a lot of in-person interaction, not just with your team, but a larger community. You should, the stories were part of the team, versus stories who are competitors, partners, players, and that’s where I feel that events. You folks on your own, even SLOconf, which has kind of become a global event. Now, first of all, talk a bit about what lessons have you learned from building and scaling a community in the SRE space, and how SLOconf also helps your job, because you get a much wider access to a much wider, you know, audience there.

Erza Zylfijaj: Yeah. So just a note for people that are new to SLOconf, we, we launched it and created it back in 2021. It is still one of the biggest conferences that has ever been made on service level objectives, and it was all, what I learned from that was actually pretty fascinating, because it was all built on organic marketing. We didn’t spend any money on ads. Didn’t spend any money on trying to get people to join it. It was all fully organic and driven with, I would say, let me go back. Okay, I’m gonna go with, I’m gonna redo this. It was fully organic. And something that I learned actually during SLOconf was that community isn’t about content necessarily. It’s about trust. So with SLOconf, we didn’t just market to people, we built with them. I invited folks to co-create, speak, and lead together with us, so that helped it feel less like a vendor event and more like a grassroots movement. Engineers respect that they respect when they, they know they’re not just showing up there for a bunch of logos. They’re not showing up there to hear a bunch of, I would say, promoted content. This was very educational driven. And it was also during a good time, and not a good time necessarily, but it was during a time where people were really craving community, because it was 2021, the lockdown was still very much going on in the pandemic was still very much going on in different areas of the country. So I think people were very eager to connect with others. And that’s, that’s to go back to marketing for engineers, you have to build a momentum. You have to look at what are the needs for the audience right now. And in-person events, I mean, that wouldn’t have worked at that time. And another reason why I don’t think in-person events for us or to create, to make SLOconf in-person wasn’t the best solution, was because we have such a wide audience, and it gave me personally an insight, who was, it was very, very early on in my career, gave me an insight on how important, how big SLOs are, and that there’s a big need out there for engineering communities to come together and to discuss service level objectives. So I think that that’s a big lesson for me, and especially the power community holds when it comes to marketing.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When I started talking to Nobl9, that’s when the concept of SLOs, you know, started emerging. And, you know, now it has kind of become kind of central to how teams think about reliability. Earlier, we used to talk about SLAs and other things. Can you also, just for the sake of our audience, quickly explain what is SLOs, service level objectives, and why do you think SLOs are gaining so much traction?

Erza Zylfijaj: So SLOs or service level objectives are reliability goals based on what your users actually need. Instead of chasing every alert, SLOs help teams focus on what really matters, like keeping key services fast and available. That’s what really makes SLOs important for so many companies out there, and they’re not just important for engineers, but for teams throughout the organization, because if your services are reliable and moving the way they should, then your customers will be happy, users will be happy, and your engineering team, of course, will be happy too. And why SLOs are becoming important? Well, one reason is because modern systems are too complex for uptime alone to tell us the full story. SLOs give teams a way to define what good reliability actually means to their users, right, and how much risk is acceptable. So I think SLOs help teams shift from reacting to every alert and to make you more strategic, business-aligned decisions.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And I’m seeing this pattern across the industry where we are moving away from being reactive to being proactive. Also, thanks to AI, GenAI, you do have more capabilities, and you also talked about that. Can you share a few examples of how adopting SLOs has actually helped teams move from reactive firefighting mode to more proactive reliability practices, because you know when you are reactive, you actually lose control. You know you are reacting to it, but when you’re proactive, you plan things. Everything is under your control. So can you share some examples?

Erza Zylfijaj: This example is top of my head is actually from a customer that uses SLOs to pause future development for a full quarter. They were facing constant firefighting, but once they had clear SLO data, they realized where the real risk actually was. So by focusing just on their critical services and tightening those objectives, they reduced the severe incidents by over 40% in two months. And that kind of shift from gut feel to data-backed decisions is exactly what SLOs enable.

Swapnil Bhartiya: As you earlier mentioned that when you talk about community, it’s all about trust. Marketing folks who are in the same shoes as you are, and they’re also trying to reach technical audiences, especially SREs. What advice would you give them to build this trust and engagement in the right way? So developers can see through all the marketing fluff and bluff so that developers do feel that you are actually here to help solve their problems and not sell your products, correct?

Erza Zylfijaj: So I would say, I mean, there’s a lot of things I can say here, but the most important one would be lead with empathy and not ego. Understand their world, the pressures, the workflows, the tools. Don’t sell to them. Talk with them. And I know it’s hard, because when you, when you, when you like a product, and the product you’re marketing, the product you’re representing, it’s hard not to concentrate on what’s so amazing with the product. But from an engineering point of view, from their point of view, they don’t really care about that as much, they care about what you’re solving for them. So don’t underestimate the power of useful content, either, whether that’s blogs, webinars, interviews, whatever works for your audience. Try to leverage that as much as you can. And if you can help them solve a problem, they’ll come to you. They’ll come back to you. You don’t have to do a lot of chasing. So I would say, and another, another pro tip right now would be with AI taking over so much, definitely leverage AI to your benefit, but don’t let it take over your whole marketing strategy. Use it more as a tool to help organize and to help maybe communicate with audience, but do the core communication yourself, and because people listen to people, right, if something feels too fluffy or too AI generalized, then you, you might be losing a key persona in your, in your marketing campaigns.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Now, as you know, easy is as it may sound, but the fact is that developers, they have their toes in the latest technology as marketing folks, or even as journalists. You know, I cannot be neck deep into the woods to actually understand the fine-grained nuances of technologies. So how can marketing folks kind of get deep enough? So what is their secret sauce to be able to talk the language, the tone that engineers understand?

Erza Zylfijaj: I would say something that I recommend to anyone out there is work with the engineers in your team. I’m lucky enough I work with a lot of talented and smart people and try to listen to them. What are they saying, what works for them? And when I write blogs, for example, a lot of times I am running these blogs by the engineers in my team or the more technical folks in my team, for feedback or to hear their voice, and amplify their voices and their stories, but still use my marketing knowledge into making that more maybe approachable and more marketing coded, but be curious and respectful of their world at the end of the day. I think that’s something that I see in so much marketing out there, where we kind of miss that point sometimes as marketers, because we’re only thinking from our point of view. So work with engineers in your team to begin with and try to understand the product well enough. And I mean, it’s, it’s always good to know the product you’re promoting and selling, right? But try to understand the product well enough, and what are the key points? What? What makes it different? What, what will engineers out there care about? So I would say, avoid fluff. Focus on solving real problems. I know it sounds, it’s, it’s easier said than done, but when you work with, across the team and across the organization, you’ll get to that point, and like text messaging, I’m a big fan of A/B testing. Just because something sounds very good in my eyes or in my head doesn’t mean that it’s going to translate very good to the more technical audiences. So I try to really take advantage of the amazing folks in my team, their knowledge, their experience, and especially if they have an engineering background, that’s always helpful, because that’s the people that I’m talking to at the end of the day, or that’s the people I’m trying to reach. So I would say, don’t keep marketing super close-ended, try to expand it more. And that probably goes to every other department and team.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Erza, thank you so much for joining me today, and of course, share great insights on what it takes to be a great marketing program manager for technical teams like SREs. Thanks for great insights, and I look forward to chat with you folks again. Thank you.

Erza Zylfijaj: Thank you so much. This was amazing. I appreciate the opportunity.