Exactly. That's why I have a line of other engineers waiting for me to teach/show them how to sell the product they built.
Being a hybrid between a software engineer and marketer does give me a perspective that few here get to see.
Oh, I see. Totally agree. Knowing what users actually need and knowing how to sell it to them is the most valuable thing in an early stage company. Way more valuable than engineering talent.
> many people, many engineers are really great at designing a product but absolutely terrified to actually tell anyone about it or to promote themselves or to say it’s good. So marketing and sales are complete anathema to them. But you’re going to have to step up to the plate and do some of it.
I agree. There's always a lot of talk about how engineers neglect sales and its utmost importance to a startup's success. But I haven't seen lots of literature on encouraging engineers to come out of the shell to (rationally) "brag" about your product. Not all engineers have the confidence to do it or are just plain humble - Woz comes to mind.
A search for "marketing for engineers" only turns up content that explains marketing concepts and strategies to the uninitiated (inbound, organic, SEO...), but I'd like to see more on how to effectively step outside of your code editor, take pride and broadcast your technical creation to the world - for either economic or nonprofit motivations.
I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like...
- “Marketing is evil!” ... perhaps but it’s also a necessary evil if you want anyone using your product
- “Build it and they will come” ... except they won’t unless you tell people
- “I hate spam/push messages/ads therefor everyone else must do to” ... but engineers tend to be the grumpiest about this stuff. Drip marketing to get users to engage progressively with your app, for example, can be valuable to users that even forgot they installed your app in the first place, because something distracted them right after
- “We have all these features / options so let’s so let’s just show them all to the user and let them figure it out” ... paradox of choice etc
And many more. You could _almost_ argue that some jobs, like PM, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer largely exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers... I don’t mean that seriously for obvious reasons but think there’s some truth in it
I agree with most of this. I work in marketing and knowing Excel better than most (hardly coding I know) and a little bit of VBA and I get a lot of efficiencies where others can't. I'm now leaning some basic web programming at the moment. It helps open the mind to what can be done which in turn should make me a better marketeer when it comes to making plans. Plus it is good to know if engineers are being asked to do too much or if someone is just work shy... when invariably we ask people to do too much.
On the flip side I think it would be great for the engineers to spend some time in marketing and close up that divide to work better together. Often I see both sides try to keep each other out other their business when much value can be had when marketing gels with engineering.
The truth is though that most of the best engineers I know are some of the worst at marketing. They can have a great idea and great execution, but they can't effectively sell people on it, and they often simply think people will automatically buy it because it works and provides a useful service. Rationally, that makes sense.
Unfortunately, that's not really how things work most of the time. If you've started a business, you should know that sales and marketing takes work; even if you have the best product, it's not useful if nobody knows about it, or if it is associated with the wrong thing. That's why marketing is valuable.
I moved to product marketing. I have the benefit of working for a company that makes a product for ops engineers which was my previous role as well as exposure to marketing concepts from working at a marketing tech company previously. I understand the product audience in ways that traditional marketers do not and I understand our marketers in ways that most engineers do not.
It's fun and it's a nice change of pace. I've retained some engineering responsibilities. So what might be a passion project for someone on an engineering team, I develop something and then start writing blog content to help educate our audience around the subject. Our product has the ability to fire a JSON doc at an endpoint which gives you the ability to integrate us with other systems... To many ops engineers can't write a web service to bridge us with that other system. So, I'll write a small service and then after it's up on GitHub I'll write a tutorial and walkthrough of the service. If you just download what I wrote and run it, awesome. I've helped solve a customer issue. If you take my blog post and learn to write your own service, that's even better!
I'd also add that, as much as many engineers hate the fact, marketing is very necessary to sell things to the general market. It's also a real skill set to figure out how to market things well. Even more so when trying to sell technical capabilities.
As a marketer, improving my understanding of the development process and technology in general has been one of the best skills I continue to learn. I have built a personal project iOS app but have no desire to be an engineer. (Know what you're good at and all that!)
I see it as a forever loop that continues to build on itself, going back and forth between marketing and engineering. Understanding users/behaviours/needs can greatly inform the product scoping and add clarity to the development process with the “why” that makes a product or feature more useful - which in turn then becomes easier to market and solve user use cases.
I think the reason this attitude exists is because the barrier of entry for engineering is higher and more concrete than it is for marketing, or sales, or product. Most people can walk into an entry-level marketing job and get things done, at least poorly. The same isn't true for an entry-level engineering job-- it's literally a nonstarter if you've never written code.
The truth is, very high level marketers or sales people or product managers are every bit as rare as very high level engineers. And at some point in your career you realize there's a crapton of expertise in those areas you don't have, but others do. And working with them and even deferring to their judgement in those areas gets you a lot better results than getting to be king of the castle.
Many engineers focus on sales and marketing all the time as a normal course of jobs that involve product management. Many engineers already take into account sales and marketing perspectives in very effective ways, especially quantitative ways that are underused by employees whose sole jobs are exclusively in sales or marketing.
It’s very tiring to see engineers be tacitly assumed to need remedial time in other fields to gain sufficient appreciation for them, especially when the reciprocal deficiency of experience in engineering is virtually never raised for sales, marketing, etc. while engineers often do self-learn quite effective product and business skills.
Am I crazy, or does the subject of this post miss the point completely?
Wasn't the whole point of this article the fact that the writer WASN'T an engineer, but that he intimately learned the product he was marketing, and that was what people wanted?
I think the point here is that the good marketers are the people who can crossover from one part of the office to the next. An engineer with no social skills will do no better than a marketer with no technical knowledge-- you need both. This article happened to be about a marketer who crossed over, not the other way around.
Well said. I work on engineering stuff but I spend a huge amount of time encouraging people to understand the other parts of the business and their needs.
Thanks for the debate (I can't reply to your last post). My experience has indeed been that engineers add more value to tech companies than marketers do.
I suspect it's also a matter of company stage (I'm predominantly early stage). If I were given $1M to start a tech company, I wouldn't hire any pure marketers. I'd hire engineers who have proven that they can design products.
I think the problem I have with marketers is that it divorces product definition from product construction. In my experience the best products come from the two being as close as possible. Ideally in one person.
Well said. Engineers shouldn't be afraid of sales or marketing, and can often do it as well or better than "business types". Treating it as a separate world sets up an unhealthy dynamic.
I expect our different views come from our experiences. In particular it helps to have the experience of working with a really great marketing person and a really great engineer to understand how they each contribute to the overall success of a company.
"... it's clear that plenty of engineers play a marketing role in addition to their role of 'shipping'."
That is an interesting statement to make. Some really great marketers that I've met started with a CS or EE degree, and some really great engineers I've met started with Economics or physics degrees. It isn't the degree that defines them, it is where (and how) they add value to the goals of the company.
In the 'way back' times there was a video format war, it was called 'betamax' vs 'vhs'. Betamax was a better engineered standard, VHS was a better marketed standard. Then there was the "OSI" vs "TCP/IP" network wars, OSI was heavily marketed, but TCP/IP was better engineered [1]. Word vs WordPerfect, Lotus 123 vs Excel, Firewire vs USB, the road is littered with "products" and "standards" where either good marketing or good engineering determined their success or not in the market place.
Generally it seems that if you have two competitors with equivalent engineering teams, bet on the one with the better marketing. If you have two teams with equivalent marketing bet on the better engineering team. Either marketing or engineering can cover for some weakness in the other team, so yes, I value them equally.
That you don't suggests you haven't experienced really great marketing. There was a great post by Joe Kraus (Google Ventures) on this [2]. Something to think about.
[1] Some (many?) would argue that OSI was over-engineered, but either way it was heavily marketed.
"being connected directly into your customers and letting them drive what they needed and balancing it with the engineering,"
Lucky you however, letting 'raw' Engineers interface with customers is usually a disaster. Engineers build tech, the company builds products, and they are very, very different things. A lot of pieces in there - support, training, docs, price, risk, leverage, IP, know-how, relationship management, legality, confidentiality.
Experienced Engineers who have a lot of exposure to Product, Sales etc. can do this, there's usually a role there for a highly technical person to support sales.
If it were only a matter of 'the customer saying we need XYZ and Engineers doing that' then great, but it's almost never that.
My takeaway was that it's that it's easier for an engineer to pick up the necessary marketing skills to sell to other engineers, rather than a business person picking up the necessary engineering skills. (Assuming that these engineers already have the necessary social skills)
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