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I worked in Twilio's marketing department from 2011-14. A key part of our marketing 101 classes for new recruits was that marketing was not a bad word. In fact,
by coloneltcb 10y ago
I worked in Twilio's marketing department from 2011-14. A key part of our marketing 101 classes for new recruits was that marketing was not a bad word. In fact, to not market a product is an insult to it. The highest honor you can pay to all the hard work that went in to the product, is to market the hell out of it and make sure it gets used.
- petercooper 10y agoExactly. If someone doesn't want to get their product out to customers, it's a shame they don't have a product they believe in.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoIt's also a shame when true believers market their product endlessly.
- pc86 10y agoMuch easier for someone who doesn't want to hear it to simply not listen than for someone to hear about a product they need that the creators are unwilling to talk about.
- shostack 10y agoHow did you tackle internal negativity from engineers who as a whole tend to skew towards the "anti-marketing" sentiment?
- ars 10y agoAre engineers against marketing, or are they against emotion based marketing (think car or clothing ads)?
- shostack 10y agoI've encountered engineers throughout my career that have been against all of it.
- caseysoftware 10y agoAlso from the Twilio marketing team (2011-2013) as a developer evangelist... First, by being developers. The first word in our title was "developer" and each of us had 10+ years of serious ship-it experience on projects large and small from all over various industries. Even if we didn't know that specific problem, we had shared experiences and mindsets. Next, by treating everyone with respect. It didn't matter if you were in a "boring" job behind the scenes or the most amazing job with accolades and attention or the person making the purchasing decision, you are someone to be treated with dignity and respect. Finally, by being hero makers. That was our internal code name at the time. Our job was not to promote ourselves and get our names out there. It was to help make that developer, that hacker, that entrepreneur be admired and a hero in their organization. That meant helping them design, build, and ship useful tools quickly that would work today, tomorrow, and a year from now. My 0.02.