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Wow. It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporti

Wow. It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more that convince strangers to become users and users to become customers. How does an engineering team prioritize what to work on based on feedback from tens of millions of users across every country on the globe and most hardware/software platforms. Are engineers suppose to recruit, train, pay, and manage themselves? Are customers suppose to support themselves? Or is a script going to take care of that? B2C companies are hard, partially because it takes lots of C's to make the B viable, and working with C's is expensive.

cpach 8y ago
”It takes more than engineers to run a company.” Yes, that is true. It’s still possible to hire too many people, be it engineers or designers or sales reps.
DocTomoe 8y ago
> ux Well, at least these guys have been diametral to Evernote's effectivity for me. I used to use the app daily as a paying customer - after the "everything needs to be white or a very light shade of grey" update, I hardly do anymore - it's just too exhausting and confusing to operate. I have not yet pulled the plug on my subscription - but most likely will once a serious contender with OCR comes around.
coldtea 8y ago
>It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more that convince strangers to become users and users to become customers. Yes, but not much more, especially if you're just a glorified notes app, which other companies manage to be with 1/10 the workforce. And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  It would appear that the product itself hasn't worked that well for Evernote either, so there's obviously blame to go around.
- sgt 8y ago
  To be honest (and not to seem arrogant), I know a lot of extremely talented engineers who have on occasion - or would be perfectly capable of - coming up with copy, art, offers, banners, ux and spend some time on marketing. And it would be automated.
- reilly3000 8y ago
  225 Million users later...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 8y ago
    It's easy to get tons of users if you're selling $10 dollar bills for $1 dollar.
  - jaynate 8y ago
    Vast majority of whom have never paid a dime for an Evernote product.
  - iterati 8y ago
    User isn't the same as customer, though. Evernote needs customers. They only have users.
  - cableshaft 8y ago
    Are they active, recurring users? I bet a good number of those are people who tried it for a week or two, realized it didn't cover their needs or they couldn't keep up with it or they didn't like all their information siloed in one application or something, and then stopped using it. Like I tried Evernote once, for example, and I'm probably counted in that list of users, but I never used it for more than a couple of days before going back to Google Keep and Google Docs (with some Scrivener when I want to make an ebook).
cecja 8y ago
yeah, the overhead at evernote is still way to high.
ltbarcly3 8y ago
Let me tell a story: Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around. You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day. You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor. Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager. Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects. Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free. How do you fix this company?
snaky 8y ago
> It takes more than engineers to run a company It depends. First company of Evernote founder was run by engineers, had a contracts with Apple (Newton handwriting recognition technology), Disney, Microsoft, and their tech is still sorting mail at USPS[1]. This is the photo of the Paragraph team circa 1991 - https://maxkotin.com/2018/03/12/book-about-paragraph/ https://maxkotin.com/2018/03/12/book-about-paragraph/ [1] https://www.parascript.com/usps-awards-parascript-contract-for-ocr-to-support-automated-parcel-bundle-sorting-at-usps-facilities-throughout-the-united-states/ https://www.parascript.com/usps-awards-parascript-contract-f...
village-idiot 8y ago
Product people are important, I don’t think Op was saying otherwise. But it’s typically more labor intensive to actually implement the ideas that product has, so in a healthy org you would expect to see more engineers than product people to ensure that everything is close to in balance.
shady-lady 8y ago
> marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more Most of these are done by a) outside agencies or if they're big enough b) in house design staff or c) templates
- shady-lady 8y ago
  To give a concrete example of what marketing staff "do". When facebook & "viral" was mainstream, our marketing staff decided they wanted to make something go viral. It was an image with the word 'SALE' (90% of image area) & our company logo (10% of image area). Company wide email: "blahblah blah..Let's make this go viral!!" It was then that I realised job titles don't equate to talent or impact. Marketing is 90% admin and the 10% that is creative can be better handled by more creative people(frequently not in the marketing dept - engineers/designers)
camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
It doesn't seem like they're arguing against those people's jobs existing. Anybody with some sense can see value in those positions. I think they're highlighting the absurd ratio of non-engineering staff for a software product. Having used it, I am kind of blown away that an application like Evernote would ever have 360 people working on it. Given the scope of what it does, it seems like 54 people should be able to hold that fort down.
reilly3000 8y ago
This is particularly relevant from my particular perspective. Maybe you could call me a trans worker- I have pretty successfully transitioned from a full-time marketing and sales person to a mostly developer, partially product person over the past several years. I really love and hate both sides of the work, but I'm glad to have walked in so many shoes. There is rigor that marketers and sales folks face that most engineers would not succeed at. Despite the fact that you only see them in meetings, they do a remarkable amount of work to make things not go off the rails, and most of it is invisible. Sales heavy firms do tend to close first, engineer later, and that generally results in terrible deliverables. Conversely, engineering heavy firms are notorious for delivering products that feature everything and deliver little to no (perceived, ie actual) value. My assertion is that it truly takes all kinds. I find it remarkable that Evernote can serve 225M people with 500. I think that the people who give effort to find the genius in every department themselves become enlightened.

cpach 8y ago

”It takes more than engineers to run a company.” Yes, that is true. It’s still possible to hire too many people, be it engineers or designers or sales reps.

DocTomoe 8y ago

> ux Well, at least these guys have been diametral to Evernote's effectivity for me. I used to use the app daily as a paying customer - after the "everything needs to be white or a very light shade of grey" update, I hardly do anymore - it's just too exhausting and confusing to operate. I have not yet pulled the plug on my subscription - but most likely will once a serious contender with OCR comes around.

coldtea 8y ago

>It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more that convince strangers to become users and users to become customers. Yes, but not much more, especially if you're just a glorified notes app, which other companies manage to be with 1/10 the workforce. And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.

tallanvor 8y ago
It would appear that the product itself hasn't worked that well for Evernote either, so there's obviously blame to go around.
sgt 8y ago
To be honest (and not to seem arrogant), I know a lot of extremely talented engineers who have on occasion - or would be perfectly capable of - coming up with copy, art, offers, banners, ux and spend some time on marketing. And it would be automated.
reilly3000 8y ago
225 Million users later...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 8y ago
  It's easy to get tons of users if you're selling $10 dollar bills for $1 dollar.
- jaynate 8y ago
  Vast majority of whom have never paid a dime for an Evernote product.
- iterati 8y ago
  User isn't the same as customer, though. Evernote needs customers. They only have users.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  Are they active, recurring users? I bet a good number of those are people who tried it for a week or two, realized it didn't cover their needs or they couldn't keep up with it or they didn't like all their information siloed in one application or something, and then stopped using it. Like I tried Evernote once, for example, and I'm probably counted in that list of users, but I never used it for more than a couple of days before going back to Google Keep and Google Docs (with some Scrivener when I want to make an ebook).

cecja 8y ago

yeah, the overhead at evernote is still way to high.

ltbarcly3 8y ago

Let me tell a story: Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around. You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day. You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor. Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager. Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects. Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free. How do you fix this company?

snaky 8y ago

> It takes more than engineers to run a company It depends. First company of Evernote founder was run by engineers, had a contracts with Apple (Newton handwriting recognition technology), Disney, Microsoft, and their tech is still sorting mail at USPS[1]. This is the photo of the Paragraph team circa 1991 - https://maxkotin.com/2018/03/12/book-about-paragraph/ https://maxkotin.com/2018/03/12/book-about-paragraph/ [1] https://www.parascript.com/usps-awards-parascript-contract-for-ocr-to-support-automated-parcel-bundle-sorting-at-usps-facilities-throughout-the-united-states/ https://www.parascript.com/usps-awards-parascript-contract-f...

village-idiot 8y ago

Product people are important, I don’t think Op was saying otherwise. But it’s typically more labor intensive to actually implement the ideas that product has, so in a healthy org you would expect to see more engineers than product people to ensure that everything is close to in balance.

shady-lady 8y ago

> marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more Most of these are done by a) outside agencies or if they're big enough b) in house design staff or c) templates

shady-lady 8y ago
To give a concrete example of what marketing staff "do". When facebook & "viral" was mainstream, our marketing staff decided they wanted to make something go viral. It was an image with the word 'SALE' (90% of image area) & our company logo (10% of image area). Company wide email: "blahblah blah..Let's make this go viral!!" It was then that I realised job titles don't equate to talent or impact. Marketing is 90% admin and the 10% that is creative can be better handled by more creative people(frequently not in the marketing dept - engineers/designers)

camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago

It doesn't seem like they're arguing against those people's jobs existing. Anybody with some sense can see value in those positions. I think they're highlighting the absurd ratio of non-engineering staff for a software product. Having used it, I am kind of blown away that an application like Evernote would ever have 360 people working on it. Given the scope of what it does, it seems like 54 people should be able to hold that fort down.

reilly3000 8y ago

This is particularly relevant from my particular perspective. Maybe you could call me a trans worker- I have pretty successfully transitioned from a full-time marketing and sales person to a mostly developer, partially product person over the past several years. I really love and hate both sides of the work, but I'm glad to have walked in so many shoes. There is rigor that marketers and sales folks face that most engineers would not succeed at. Despite the fact that you only see them in meetings, they do a remarkable amount of work to make things not go off the rails, and most of it is invisible. Sales heavy firms do tend to close first, engineer later, and that generally results in terrible deliverables. Conversely, engineering heavy firms are notorious for delivering products that feature everything and deliver little to no (perceived, ie actual) value. My assertion is that it truly takes all kinds. I find it remarkable that Evernote can serve 225M people with 500. I think that the people who give effort to find the genius in every department themselves become enlightened.