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Ask HN: Is a digital marketer a slave to the developers?

• quickthrower 9y ago
  Developers experience the same issue with users. Relying on users to.give feedback, initial requirements.etc.
• mayank 9y ago
  A number of companies now let you drop an SDK into your app build and let marketers manage some aspects of the app via a web GUI (push notification campaigns and a/b testing at least). Check out www.leanplum.com
• e10jc 9y ago
  I would say if they cannot operate third-party services like Google Tag Manager, then yes. But that's on them. A warning sign of an ineffective department (marketing, ads, comms, etc) is when they insist that anything involving a web site gets clumped under "tech".
  • vishnuvvn 9y ago
    Unfortunately, we can't have tech in-house in 90% of the businesses worldwide.
• jenkstom 9y ago
  Time for MarketOps...
• travem 9y ago
  My thoughts are that invoking slavery to denote a dependency is ridiculous.
  • vishnuvvn 9y ago
    Yes, I agree with you. Could've framed that better.
• wjossey 9y ago
  No. No team member at a company should ever be a slave to another, regardless of their role and function. Teamwork and participation in a group is all about service, not slavery. The developer acts in service to the marketer, who needs assistance with things like funnel tweaks, event wiring, analytics add one, and more. The digital marketer is in service to the developer, as they can add fresh users to a platform, which can provide insights and illuminate opportunities for improvement. If we keep looking throughout an organization, all roles manifest themselves this way. Whether it be finance, support, operations, design, product, or legal. If we position our perspective from that as an adversarial one (a la slavery), the perspective does look like one where productivity is reduced drastically because we are blocked on one another. If we view it positively (a la in service of one another), and act accordingly, we find that whatever slowdowns we perceive at a micro level are made up for in major macro improvements. So, to answer your original question, no. Marketers are not slaves to developers.
  • vishnuvvn 9y ago
    Yes, slavery could've framed better. However, I wanted to get the message across.
• evadne 9y ago
  No. Marketing / Sales / Support should have its own technology budget to run systems it needs.
  • vishnuvvn 9y ago
    Small and medium sized business cannot have a separate budget. Esp when the marketing is the cost center, most of the time cannot have a developer full time assisting them.
    • evadne 9y ago
      I would take this point further as evidence why a developer, who does not wish to spend time on non-product engineering, should not join a small or medium sized business. It is fine to have an engineer do both jobs, but my stance is that time spent on non-product engineering needs to be accounted under the proper accounting bucket, in order to avoid diffusion of responsibilities.
• davidivadavid 9y ago
  Most of the things you've listen can be done (and are routinely done) by marketers. Because they're marketers doesn't mean they can't use a computer. There are cases where developers may be required (e.g. building a custom tool for some campaign) but that work can often be outsourced.
• throwaway2016a 9y ago
  The way most companies handle this is by giving the marketing team a budget to have their own dedicated developer or two. To that extent they are no more a slave to the developer than a person dining at a restaurant is a slave to their wait staff. Sure the water could take extra long to deliver the food but that does not mean they are in control. To be a slave the other person needs to be exercising control over you. As a developer, ever try to tell marketing that they can't do something for technical reasons, scheduling, or because it is just a bad idea? Extreme example, the way I have seen it work mostly: 1. Marketing wants to make all advertisement autoplay audio 2. Development says: we are busy until next week working on a major deadline, and even if we did have the time autoplaying audio ads is a terrible idea because it has been shows repeatedly to turn off people from your brand 3. Marketing talks to the CEO 4. The ad are autoplaying audio that night and now the developers have to work extra hours because the deadline they were working on still needs to be done. If anything it is the other way around... devs are a slave to marketing. Marketing says "jump" the devs have to say "how high?" regardless of what else they were working on. You say: > This reduces the productivity of digital marketers drastically. But in reality unless marketing has it's own developers you are in fact decreasing developers productivity and costing the company a lot of time, potentially money, and in many cases decreasing the work-life balance of the developers. Think about what those developers needed to stop working on to do your task. I doubt they were sitting on their hands. Edit: with that said, there doesn't mean it's not a problem that needs to be fixed. But put yourself in the developers shoe's for a minute. They don't like the arrangement any more than marketing does. And it doesn't help when marketing shows no respect for the developers time. Real world example: a marketing team at one of our clients has been working on a TV ad campaign for months. They finished the TV campaign and now they need a landing page for it... they just told us about this landing page Wednesday. The ad campaign "absolutely has to start Friday"... the amount of disrespect you need to have for developers to do something like that is incredible. They new about the need for a landing page for months and gave dev 3 days when they got months to make their 30 second video...
  • vishnuvvn 9y ago
    Agree with every point you said. On a slightly lighter note, are you a developer?
• mindcrash 9y ago
  Pretty weird thing to say, and it signals that your organization design is incorrect. What you should have in place is: 1) A department solely dedicated to product design, development and management 2) A department dedicated to offline and online marketing. This includes people who are able to create marketing assets including web developers, content designers and even video editors (e.g. for creating content for TV or YouTube) Because what you mean with "slave" is that the people running your marketing department currently seem dependent on the people working on your product who have ZERO time to put into marketing efforts because their schedules are filled to the brink with product work, which is not really strange What is strange however is that you created this dependency which seems to completely destroy your ability to do digital marketing. So hire yourself a small team to help your marketing department out with all things they are incapable to do. Right now I'm thinking about the following roles: a designer (which hopefully can double as a frontend developer), a front developer (in case the forementioned designer only can design -- yes they still exist), a developer with knowledge of the CMS system you are using and someone who is able to keep your marketing related systems up and running (this could also be the forementioned developer). Let them report to your head of marketing, let them work solely on marketing related taks and your problem is solved.
  • vishnuvvn 9y ago
    Sorry, I wasn't talking about our organization. I was talking in general. End of the day, marketers still need developers to do their day-to-day jobs.