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I work solely in marketing/advertising and have no clue how to code. I generally enjoy technology, which is why I'm on HN. I think marketers and developers nee

I work solely in marketing/advertising and have no clue how to code. I generally enjoy technology, which is why I'm on HN. I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between ourselves. The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project. Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX. Marketing can provide developers with insights into the problems they should try to solve. From what I can tell, many developers view the development process as a sacred protected space for creation. This is not the optimal means to delivering a high-impact product. Developers should be asking themselves during the development process: "Is this feature going to excite a group of users, and do we have some statistical mechanism to predict that excitement?" When you create something that you already know will excite people, the product launch becomes much simpler.

glitchc 5y ago
Is there a mechanism to make this transition easier or access folks as like-minded as you? As a technology developer, chatting with technology enthusiasts can be very enlightening as they attempt to understand your technology and figure out the target market.
enriquto 5y ago
> This is not the optimal means to delivering a high-impact product. This is just a single data point, but for a view "from the other side", my honest and immediate answer to this question is: "I don't care". When writing programs, my concern has never been "to deliver a high-impact product". In fact, I find this language very annoying; and saying that my program is a "product" feels like a very offensive insult. The goal is never to deliver a product, much less a high impact product. The goal is always to solve a problem that I have, regardless of whether any other person on earth has the same problem. Now, I may have been given that problem because it was deemed useful to other people, but during the actual act of programming I prefer to make an abstraction of that and focus only on the problem itself. EDIT: I appreciate that there are managers and such that keep proposing meaningful problems. I also like to find problems myself, and sometimes I appreciate when (rarely) they turn out to be shared with others, who in turn are happy that I solved them. But this is always a happy secondary effect, never the main goal.
- ttymck 5y ago
  I understand your viewpoint, but I feel like you are talking about something else entirely. GP discussed (paraphrasing): "building a product, trying to get customers", so to respond by saying "it's not a product, I don't want customers" isn't exactly continuing the discussion. For hobby projects, I agree with you whole-heartedly.
  - hluska 5y ago
    That’s the other side of the builder mindset. It’s relatively easy for builders to build things that solve their own problems. That’s a tool and builders like tools. It takes a really big mental leap to go from “I built a thing” to “I built a product.” The thing is, things are products. But the answer isn’t “all hackers are wrong, you’re dumb for not involving me early on.” Rather, the answer is ‘chill, you’ve got this.’
- hluska 5y ago
  That’s the marketing mindset. Marketers are not builders and they are incapable of understanding why we build things. Sometimes we build something to solve a problem that we have. Sometimes we build something because we want to learn. Other times, we build things because we’re bored. We don’t need a product placement meeting before we type git -m commit “First commit” and if we did, the bast majority of cool things would never have been built. Sometimes we just build because that’s what builders do.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    But — the original post is about a developer who clearly is treating their project as a product. So, the top comment completely makes sense in that context.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Look, I am a builder at heart, too. I love writing software for all sorts of reasons. When I am working for someone who is paying me, though, I am only building for one reason; to deliver value to my employer. That is the entire reason I am being paid. I build for other reasons at other times. I really hate working with other developers who think like you do. It is so hard to work with people who care more about the code itself than what it is for. We aren’t working for the same goal, and sometimes the beautiful code actually makes it harder to accomplish our actual goal.
hluska 5y ago
This is such a typical marketing response. Instead of building people up, you’ve got to come in and tell them that they’ve been wrong since the start? And the path to being right is through hiring someone like you?? First, this doesn’t do anyone any favours. Second, if marketing types would stop being such know it alls, you would have an easier time interacting with developers while they’re building something. Third, marketing isn’t special. And finally, you don’t even understand how or why developers build things. Be nice and build developers up, especially on a thread with a bunch of people sharing their innermost fears. This whole “you’ve been wrong since the beginning; the cure is me” is terrible marketing. Not to mention that it’s cruel. Be decent to hackers.
- MarcellusDrum 5y ago
  I'm a developer, and I can't find anything disrespectful in OP's comment. I don't know anything about marketing to determine if what they are saying is true, but they are giving their opinion based on their experience, which I find valuable and worth considering.
- kristiandupont 5y ago
  And in another thread you wrote "Marketers are not builders and they are incapable of understanding why we build things." You are not exactly making developers look good here.
fny 5y ago
No. Marketing and sales should be siloed away from devs. This is why you need a product person to intermediate. Marketing and sales has very different incentives from developers. Marketers are often trigger happy with features because they "sell" despite the fact that these feature may have a short shelf life and may take resources away from developing of more essential product features. Developers are similarly allergic to additional development because it's (1) work (2) often results in technical debt. You need to have an intermediary to think about what features actually matter and how they fit into a broader development roadmap otherwise you risk building a product with lots of bells and whistles no one really cares about that's a beast to maintain.
- ianbutler 5y ago
  I think this is a bad take depending on the context, especially for small companies. First you’re painting developers with a rather broad brush. I know plenty of developers who like to think about how features impact end users and like to interact with people in general to figure out how to build the right features that create that impact. Good developers are perfectly capable of interacting with broader teams to create something that really benefits users. Similarly not all marketers are “trigger happy with features” a lot of marketers understand how feature work impacts developers and actually take time to figure out the most important features to build and market and don’t have short shelf life. In my experience you’ve basically just described people bad at their jobs all around. Following your advice would just be adding potentially unnecessary headcount and creating an unnecessary communication gap between two critical teams, again with a focus on small business or startups. I do think larger companies could do well with less compartmentalization as well though.
- hluska 5y ago
  I catch your point but honestly, developers are in a better place to make those kinds of decisions. It just takes some mindset training. When a potential customer has a problem, they go through several hoops before they have any hope of finding a solution. First, they have to recognize and identify a problem. Second, they have to motivate themselves to solve that particular problem over all others. Once a potential customer has made those leaps, they are potentially your potential customer. That’s when the language leap comes into play. My favourite example is “I built a scraper but it turns out the market wants an automated tool to crawl their entire website and return some data.” Catch what happened there?? I built a scraper but the paying market doesn’t know what a scraper is. If your language matches up with a potential customer’s language, there is a chance they will see you, pay attention and decide that you could solve their problem. That’s around the time when marketing campaigns will make you question Darwin but try to act surprised…:) Once you catch that stuff, it’s easier to push back on shitty bloatware marketing feature requests. What’s the real problem here? Does that new feature solve a problem or does it just increase the chances that a potential customer will find you?? If it increases the chance a customer will find you, it might be a good feature. In my experience, it usually means you should do some tech support calls so you can figure out what words your customers use…
mellavora 5y ago
I think this post deserves a friendlier response. magicroot seems intent on offering helpful advice. Nowhere does (s)he say "hire me" or that they have the only answer; in fact the opposite. They are suggesting that just as a unit test is an important aspect of determining functionality, it may be helpful to have a metric of how much excitement a certain feature may engender. I'm not going to judge the quality of that advice; I just offer the possibility that it was a well-intentioned attempt to add a view from a different professional perspective. perhaps we can be forgiving to someone who is perhaps acting in a socially awkward manner?
- exdsq 5y ago
  I think it's just the insecurities of developers realizing they don't understand an important subject because it's separate to their work. Magicroots advice is great. Suggesting devs should be siloed from marketing in the context of a solo developer building products is insane. Signed, an insecure developer with bad marketing skills
  - oblio 5y ago
    The reality is that a lot of developers like to build just for the sake of building. This can lead to the "if you build it, they will come" mentality. Or worse, "we'll build it and we don't care if they come (and if they do come, they'd better RTFM!)" mentality. A huge amount of developers just want to be shielded from any kind of customer interaction, and I'm not talking about call center support.
    - lmarcos 5y ago
      > The reality is that a lot of developers like to build just for the sake of building. Very true. I build for the sake of building in my free time. > Or worse, "we'll build it and we don't care if they come... True as well. If I am working on a personal project is because I believe it's the best project ever conceived (obviously I know I'm wrong, but there is always "what if I'm not?!"). > A huge amount of developers just want to be shielded from any kind of customer interaction, and I'm not talking about call center support. But if we are talking in the context of developers working for companies (not developers working on their personal projects) then the only responsible person of working on features no one will use is the project manager (or product owner): they own the product, they decide what comes next (with the help of devs).
xwdv 5y ago
> Developers should be asking themselves during the development process: "Is this feature going to excite a group of users, and do we have some statistical mechanism to predict that excitement?" This is such a user-facing mindset. I’d say most of the development work I do isn’t even something the user will know about and definitely not get excited about. Also, I do not care about what happens after a feature gets built, my job is not to make sure the right things are being built, it’s to make sure things are being built right. Do your job and I’ll do mine.
- chadash 5y ago
  > my job is not to make sure the right things are being built, it’s to make sure things are being built right If you build the right things the wrong way, then you have technical debt. If you build the wrong things the right way, then you have nothing (except maybe an aesthetically pleasant code base that won't get used?). Every developer should try to have some part in making sure the right thing is being built.
  - matwood 5y ago
    > Every developer should try to have some part in making sure the right thing is being built. Bingo. For as much as developers hate technical debt, it seems many miss the obvious way to avoid it is to not build something at all.
- Invictus0 5y ago
  You're aware this discussion is in the context of a solo founder microstartup right? There is only one person/a few people doing all the jobs.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  I don't know, building the wrong thing in the right way, that never gets used by anyone, sounds kind of depressing to me.
- pc86 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen a more defensive comment on HN. "User" doesn't mean the person clicking around a website. Someone is using your software, I hope?
kdelok 5y ago
> The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project. I strongly agree with this! If you're working towards a product (and not just a hobby project) then these are crucial requirements. If they can be found out before writing any code, then they should be, since it will save time in the long run. For me it's also the kind of thing that can lead to costly changes after the fact, which is prone to rub developers up the wrong way. It seems like the principle of phase containment might apply - if you found it early in the development cycle, then it would have been easier to fix.
woutr_be 5y ago
> From what I can tell, many developers view the development process as a sacred protected space for creation. I think this entirely depends on what kind of people you hire, and what type of environment you put them in. I've worked with developers who's sole focus was on just building whatever they were told, they focused on the technical aspects, and didn't care whether it would be deployed, or if the user would even use it. I've also worked in teams, where everyone was a product engineer, which essentially just means that we focused on building products, and while the tech side was important, it was more important to make sure the product got build, and eventually used. We often worked side by side with our business teams, marketing and design people, and it was honestly the most fun I've ever had. Knowing that I was building something that people were actually going to use, just motivated and excited me.
itsmemattchung 5y ago
> The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project. Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX. Up until a couple months ago, I thought Marketing teams/organizations were a bit hand wavy. But recently, I took a digital marketing course at Georgia Tech, which changed my perspective completely: marketers (can/do/should) apply data driven techniques. As an engineer, I now (at least try) to think about how the feature I'm building will impact the end-user; it's easy to fall into a trap where you are writing code without thinking about your end users.
- pawelwentpawel 5y ago
  What's your opinion of the Georgia Tech course? I'm just on their website checking out the curriculum, seems pretty straight to the point.
  - dempseye 5y ago
    Can you drop the link to it? I'm not sure if you mean the bootcamp.
    - pawelwentpawel 5y ago
      Yes, it seems to be called a bootcamp, not a course. That's what I'm looking at - https://bootcamp.pe.gatech.edu/digitalmarketing/curriculum/ https://bootcamp.pe.gatech.edu/digitalmarketing/curriculum/
    - andrew-nguyen 5y ago
      He's talking about this course in the OMSCS program: https://omscs.gatech.edu/mgt-6311-digital-marketing https://omscs.gatech.edu/mgt-6311-digital-marketing
      - itsmemattchung 5y ago
        Hi Andrew! Thanks for dropping the link for me :)
vbezhenar 5y ago
Many developers don't want to deliver a high-impact product. They want to enjoy the process of creation, earn some reasonable money and make lifes of some people better.
- Invictus0 5y ago
  > don't want to deliver a high-impact product > earn some reasonable money These two are in opposition
  - hasmolo 5y ago
    not really, you can make good money not at a big corp, amd not work on high impact stuff. yelp, intuit, adobe all fit the bill
    - oblio 5y ago
      I like how the definition of Big Corp has changed. > Adobe 22 000 employees. Revenue of $12.86 billion. They're a literal Fortune 500 company (and not that far off from Fortune 200): https://fortune.com/company/adobe-systems/fortune500/ https://fortune.com/company/adobe-systems/fortune500/
      - yunohn 5y ago
        That’s because HN (and the general media) have come to brand just FAANG as evil megacorps. We’ve forgotten about general tech/companies, consulting, fossil/energy, etc etc that are also very very mega.
  - derwiki 5y ago
    Not at Megacorp they aren’t
    - aniforprez 5y ago
      Megacorp usually at least starts with a good product that sells well
craftinator 5y ago
I think you may have put yourself at a social disadvantage by using the phrase "high impact product", which is a trigger phrase for several developers I know. It's a trigger phrase because they work at places where hearing that during a meeting means "we are about to throw away a lot of work you've done, because we didn't bother to do any market research before we did the first 6 months of sprint cycles". To them, it just sounds like a lot of low-level manager speak that results in massive technical debt, rushed redesigns, working overtime, and the expectation that "changing software is easy". I found what you said really interesting, and am sharing it with my SO who is a marketing and business contractor. Thank you for sharing!
- magicroot75 5y ago
  Ah got it. I had no intention of doing that. I do think most of us, marketers or developers would like to make some impact. That impact is not always financial. But marketing is not necessarily always about finances. It's about understanding users/consumers and what gets them excited.
michaelje 5y ago
I agree. 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.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
> I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between ourselves. I fully agree. I've worked with an incredible b2b salesman before. He wasn't very technical, but he was always curious about what was possible and how difficult it would be to accomplish. Going to a conference with him as the technical expert was amazing. Customers were a gold mine for information. We always looked deeper to find the problems to solve, not the features to create. Learned a lot from him. Sadly, I haven't had this dynamic since. Since then, I've run into marketing departments. My issue with them is they constantly switch tools, want immediate results, and destroy site performance without any concern for the path of destruction they leave behind. And marketing is good at selling stuff internally as they are externally. As a result, few people in management care about how marketing impacts anything else in the company. On the flip side, marketing is the first department to be stabbed in the back when numbers come up badly. It's not really a surprise to me they treat other departments as scapegoats pass blame to. Things don't have to be this way. :(
- ketzo 5y ago
  Engineers tend to have this conception of all salespeople (and, to the point of the GP, marketers) as con-artists: "how can I convince this rube to buy my crap?" When in reality, as you discovered, the best salespeople are the ones who are able to really, truly understand the problems of their customer base and help them find solutions. That is an incredibly special skill, and one that should never be underrated.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    I guess the problem is that for every good salesman there's 10 conmen masquerading as good salesmen.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      …and since there's so much overlap in the skillset between a conman and a good salesman, a technical co-founder looking to hire them can't tell the difference. The safest path to avoid hiring a fraud is to create a culture that has disdain for the entire profession.
Swinx43 5y ago
You are absolutely correct. I have been working as an engineer with marketing departments of organisations and the degree to which these two sides can benefit a product or company when working together is phenomenal. "If you build it they will come" is a sure fire way to have your hopes and dreams dashed on the rocks of reality. Marketing is as important as the dev skills to make a product happen. They are two sides of the same coin of success.
edge17 5y ago
Where is that community supposed to form though? I would think those relationships tend to get made in the office, but the environment seems to he going more towards remote.
embwbam 5y ago
How might an experienced solo developer work with an experienced marketer? My network has ended up being very thin in that regard. Would you partner on some developer's zany project? Or are you folks available to consult?
cjf101 5y ago
I strongly agree with the heart of what you are saying. One of the worst bugs you can have in a product is to have built the wrong product. A good channel of communication between people who understand the customer and people who are building and designing the product is not just valuable: it's critical. There can be communication challenges between our disciplines though. Frequent changes in direction can leave software in a bit of a shambles. This is probably the thing that creates the feeling that development is "a sacred space for creation". It takes time to both make the change, and end up with code that is pleasant to work with. On teams I've been on, this has sometimes led resistance to the marketing perspective. I, personally, am often uncomfortable with the language of marketing (both on the analysis side, and on the promotion side). On the promotion side, marketing teams like to make claims that are aspirational or appeal to emotional needs, rather than actually true from a technologists perspective. On the analysis side, marketing often looks like it's working from incomplete information, and extrapolating trends that I don't feel confident exist. It feels like guessing, and I don't like to gamble. These can be difficult gaps to bridge, but ultimately, I feel like we have the same goal: building the right thing for the right audience.
syngrog66 5y ago
theres wisdom in what you advise, but I think theres one glitch with the wording which might cause a backlash. what you say a "developer" should be doing/thinking, is really not what a software engineer does or should be doing. you're talking about product development. in a small enough shop where a few people must where all the hats, sure one person might be wearing the product development and software engineering hats. in a larger, more established company, they will not. the vast majority of folks in software engineering should not be thinking in terms of user exitement, or market value or brand positioning etc. if I were a solo indie entrepreneur/engineer who had to wear all the hats I couldnt delegate to others? heck yes I should follow your advice. marketing, product design and UX are all incredibly important. but they are not the responsibility, or anywhere in the top concerns, of a software engineer. for the business overall? heck yes
sanderjd 5y ago
I think you're exactly right about this! But just to provide some insight (which you probably already have) into the mind of a different kind of person: I can both recognize the truth that marketing is critically and synergistically important, and also have just a deep seated allergy to it. I have concluded that being a freelance / independent developer or even a very early stage startup developer is not a great fit for me for this reason. I thrive more when there is lots of work to do that is not deeply attached to marketing a new product.
jvanderbot 5y ago
So how does a solo founder find a marketing enthusiast partner?
z3t4 5y ago
It also goes the other way. As a marketer dont treat marketing as a sacred protected space. Work with the developer as the developer is very good at solving problem and can make sure that the best technology is chosen to reach the marketing goal as efficient as possible.
- magicroot75 5y ago
  Totally agree!
hippich 5y ago
There is one more possibility (relevant to solo devs) - lack of trust that marketing professionals can deliver results. Personally, I do realize how important marketing is and how inadequate my skills in marketing are. But at the same time, my experience contracting out marketing taught me that there are very few good pros and i am much more likely to at best hire someone who has about the same level of experience as I am. If someone has tips on how to weed out pretenders (who themselves do not realize they are pretending) - I would love to learn about it. Unfortunately, my budget typically is too small to keep hiring until i hit the gold.
- ghaff 5y ago
  In general, contracting something out can be useful if you have some specific task to perform. We use a bunch of agencies and other outside firms. But it's almost always for something specific like running a webinar series on $X or providing social media tooling or other things like that. Marketing also covers a very wide spectrum. For a small operation, the person you might hire to create content and/or messaging for a product is probably different from the one you would hire to create a digital demand generation program.
  - hippich 5y ago
    As a solo developer, one part of the reason to contract marketing is not exactly knowing what i do not know. While I try to keep focus narrow (i.e. optimize "this PPC campaign") I also explain that I know very little about it and hope to leverage experience of the firm doing just that, and if there is anything else that needs to be done - please let me know, don't be a robot executing program exactly as given. So far I did not have much success doing it this way. Each time I have to learn about specific area and only after some understanding, trial and error, I can hire someone who will just follow the steps.
- magicroot75 5y ago
  I can take a shot at a tip on weeding at pretenders as a marketer: Ask them to describe, in technical detail, what the software does. Ask them about challenges the end user may have going through the process of using it. A bad marketer is all about creating a scummy sales pitch to get a quick buck. A great marketer is there on the frontlines understanding exactly the functions of the software and how they solve the customer's problems in implicit or explicit ways.
bonestamp2 5y ago
> Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX. What do you mean by this? I don't disagree in anyway, just looking for your insights.
winternett 5y ago
I too want to work with a marketer for my web design business, but I've found that many simply want to do early stage lead generation and then "drop" the clients over to me as a client manager, which doesn't reassure clients that marketing promises will be upheld... I think the best (development) marketers are people who invest in learning the nuances of the business (e.g. knowing there are quite distinct differences between coding in ASP.Net and PHP). The same can be said for tech recruiters... aY yAY yAy... lol. As a dev I had to learn marketing inversely, to allow me to better understand the process of ensuring clients a smooth and trust-worthy process... In running my business I have to daily be involved in absolutely every aspect of it (without being too controlling of course) because managing delivery and client experience is a key to gaining and retaining new and follow-up work. The best method of self-marketing/promoting I've found is to build my own products/portfolios that represent what would be useful and engaging to new potential clients. Working product demos also help marketers to better be acquainted with what they are ultimately selling, and make intuitive screen shots and presentations of the products in support of their efforts. That way I also have a template I can build quicker from, but I also demonstrate to clients that I can actually do the work. IT is far too complex in presentation these days; many clients are not focused on tech stacks, methods, tools, services, or things developers are usually focused on. Modern clients are usually most concerned about their requirements and business needs, a marketer should focus on being a translator in a way when it comes to marketing development work, linking that work to productivity, progress, and things that satisfy requirements and provide benefits in a clear and usually less-technically inclined manner than a developer would detail a solution... E.G.... We keep selling "the cloud" to everyone, but if you ask a client what "cloud" is they simply don't know/don't really care what it really is, as long as it fulfills their business goals. In a world where people are using imagery alone to market their capability, the real working examples of what we do as a company are often what wins us new work.... Even if we don't win new work, the products we build usually end up being valuable and highly useful to us ultimately in real life.
moneywoes 5y ago
Are there any good marketing resources you would suggest to founders? Is knowing how to build an effective Facebook add campaign key or is a focus on SEO especially BLB ( back link building ) paramount? Any blogs?
thecleaner 5y ago
I am an engineer but I admire marketing folks and their contributions to the development process. It adds valuable data points to the decision process. Are there any resources you would recommend for devs to get a hang of the marketing process / methods ? This will help us better understand marketing folks.
Khelavaster 5y ago
The challenge is: "how will a group of potential users trust this feature enough to try it after seeing advertisement?" Targetted development is straightforward with a userbase..

glitchc 5y ago

Is there a mechanism to make this transition easier or access folks as like-minded as you? As a technology developer, chatting with technology enthusiasts can be very enlightening as they attempt to understand your technology and figure out the target market.

enriquto 5y ago

> This is not the optimal means to delivering a high-impact product. This is just a single data point, but for a view "from the other side", my honest and immediate answer to this question is: "I don't care". When writing programs, my concern has never been "to deliver a high-impact product". In fact, I find this language very annoying; and saying that my program is a "product" feels like a very offensive insult. The goal is never to deliver a product, much less a high impact product. The goal is always to solve a problem that I have, regardless of whether any other person on earth has the same problem. Now, I may have been given that problem because it was deemed useful to other people, but during the actual act of programming I prefer to make an abstraction of that and focus only on the problem itself. EDIT: I appreciate that there are managers and such that keep proposing meaningful problems. I also like to find problems myself, and sometimes I appreciate when (rarely) they turn out to be shared with others, who in turn are happy that I solved them. But this is always a happy secondary effect, never the main goal.

ttymck 5y ago
I understand your viewpoint, but I feel like you are talking about something else entirely. GP discussed (paraphrasing): "building a product, trying to get customers", so to respond by saying "it's not a product, I don't want customers" isn't exactly continuing the discussion. For hobby projects, I agree with you whole-heartedly.
- hluska 5y ago
  That’s the other side of the builder mindset. It’s relatively easy for builders to build things that solve their own problems. That’s a tool and builders like tools. It takes a really big mental leap to go from “I built a thing” to “I built a product.” The thing is, things are products. But the answer isn’t “all hackers are wrong, you’re dumb for not involving me early on.” Rather, the answer is ‘chill, you’ve got this.’
hluska 5y ago
That’s the marketing mindset. Marketers are not builders and they are incapable of understanding why we build things. Sometimes we build something to solve a problem that we have. Sometimes we build something because we want to learn. Other times, we build things because we’re bored. We don’t need a product placement meeting before we type git -m commit “First commit” and if we did, the bast majority of cool things would never have been built. Sometimes we just build because that’s what builders do.
- mbreese 5y ago
  But — the original post is about a developer who clearly is treating their project as a product. So, the top comment completely makes sense in that context.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Look, I am a builder at heart, too. I love writing software for all sorts of reasons. When I am working for someone who is paying me, though, I am only building for one reason; to deliver value to my employer. That is the entire reason I am being paid. I build for other reasons at other times. I really hate working with other developers who think like you do. It is so hard to work with people who care more about the code itself than what it is for. We aren’t working for the same goal, and sometimes the beautiful code actually makes it harder to accomplish our actual goal.

hluska 5y ago

This is such a typical marketing response. Instead of building people up, you’ve got to come in and tell them that they’ve been wrong since the start? And the path to being right is through hiring someone like you?? First, this doesn’t do anyone any favours. Second, if marketing types would stop being such know it alls, you would have an easier time interacting with developers while they’re building something. Third, marketing isn’t special. And finally, you don’t even understand how or why developers build things. Be nice and build developers up, especially on a thread with a bunch of people sharing their innermost fears. This whole “you’ve been wrong since the beginning; the cure is me” is terrible marketing. Not to mention that it’s cruel. Be decent to hackers.

MarcellusDrum 5y ago
I'm a developer, and I can't find anything disrespectful in OP's comment. I don't know anything about marketing to determine if what they are saying is true, but they are giving their opinion based on their experience, which I find valuable and worth considering.
kristiandupont 5y ago
And in another thread you wrote "Marketers are not builders and they are incapable of understanding why we build things." You are not exactly making developers look good here.

fny 5y ago

No. Marketing and sales should be siloed away from devs. This is why you need a product person to intermediate. Marketing and sales has very different incentives from developers. Marketers are often trigger happy with features because they "sell" despite the fact that these feature may have a short shelf life and may take resources away from developing of more essential product features. Developers are similarly allergic to additional development because it's (1) work (2) often results in technical debt. You need to have an intermediary to think about what features actually matter and how they fit into a broader development roadmap otherwise you risk building a product with lots of bells and whistles no one really cares about that's a beast to maintain.

ianbutler 5y ago
I think this is a bad take depending on the context, especially for small companies. First you’re painting developers with a rather broad brush. I know plenty of developers who like to think about how features impact end users and like to interact with people in general to figure out how to build the right features that create that impact. Good developers are perfectly capable of interacting with broader teams to create something that really benefits users. Similarly not all marketers are “trigger happy with features” a lot of marketers understand how feature work impacts developers and actually take time to figure out the most important features to build and market and don’t have short shelf life. In my experience you’ve basically just described people bad at their jobs all around. Following your advice would just be adding potentially unnecessary headcount and creating an unnecessary communication gap between two critical teams, again with a focus on small business or startups. I do think larger companies could do well with less compartmentalization as well though.
hluska 5y ago
I catch your point but honestly, developers are in a better place to make those kinds of decisions. It just takes some mindset training. When a potential customer has a problem, they go through several hoops before they have any hope of finding a solution. First, they have to recognize and identify a problem. Second, they have to motivate themselves to solve that particular problem over all others. Once a potential customer has made those leaps, they are potentially your potential customer. That’s when the language leap comes into play. My favourite example is “I built a scraper but it turns out the market wants an automated tool to crawl their entire website and return some data.” Catch what happened there?? I built a scraper but the paying market doesn’t know what a scraper is. If your language matches up with a potential customer’s language, there is a chance they will see you, pay attention and decide that you could solve their problem. That’s around the time when marketing campaigns will make you question Darwin but try to act surprised…:) Once you catch that stuff, it’s easier to push back on shitty bloatware marketing feature requests. What’s the real problem here? Does that new feature solve a problem or does it just increase the chances that a potential customer will find you?? If it increases the chance a customer will find you, it might be a good feature. In my experience, it usually means you should do some tech support calls so you can figure out what words your customers use…

mellavora 5y ago

I think this post deserves a friendlier response. magicroot seems intent on offering helpful advice. Nowhere does (s)he say "hire me" or that they have the only answer; in fact the opposite. They are suggesting that just as a unit test is an important aspect of determining functionality, it may be helpful to have a metric of how much excitement a certain feature may engender. I'm not going to judge the quality of that advice; I just offer the possibility that it was a well-intentioned attempt to add a view from a different professional perspective. perhaps we can be forgiving to someone who is perhaps acting in a socially awkward manner?

exdsq 5y ago
I think it's just the insecurities of developers realizing they don't understand an important subject because it's separate to their work. Magicroots advice is great. Suggesting devs should be siloed from marketing in the context of a solo developer building products is insane. Signed, an insecure developer with bad marketing skills
- oblio 5y ago
  The reality is that a lot of developers like to build just for the sake of building. This can lead to the "if you build it, they will come" mentality. Or worse, "we'll build it and we don't care if they come (and if they do come, they'd better RTFM!)" mentality. A huge amount of developers just want to be shielded from any kind of customer interaction, and I'm not talking about call center support.
  - lmarcos 5y ago
    > The reality is that a lot of developers like to build just for the sake of building. Very true. I build for the sake of building in my free time. > Or worse, "we'll build it and we don't care if they come... True as well. If I am working on a personal project is because I believe it's the best project ever conceived (obviously I know I'm wrong, but there is always "what if I'm not?!"). > A huge amount of developers just want to be shielded from any kind of customer interaction, and I'm not talking about call center support. But if we are talking in the context of developers working for companies (not developers working on their personal projects) then the only responsible person of working on features no one will use is the project manager (or product owner): they own the product, they decide what comes next (with the help of devs).

xwdv 5y ago

> Developers should be asking themselves during the development process: "Is this feature going to excite a group of users, and do we have some statistical mechanism to predict that excitement?" This is such a user-facing mindset. I’d say most of the development work I do isn’t even something the user will know about and definitely not get excited about. Also, I do not care about what happens after a feature gets built, my job is not to make sure the right things are being built, it’s to make sure things are being built right. Do your job and I’ll do mine.

chadash 5y ago
> my job is not to make sure the right things are being built, it’s to make sure things are being built right If you build the right things the wrong way, then you have technical debt. If you build the wrong things the right way, then you have nothing (except maybe an aesthetically pleasant code base that won't get used?). Every developer should try to have some part in making sure the right thing is being built.
- matwood 5y ago
  > Every developer should try to have some part in making sure the right thing is being built. Bingo. For as much as developers hate technical debt, it seems many miss the obvious way to avoid it is to not build something at all.
Invictus0 5y ago
You're aware this discussion is in the context of a solo founder microstartup right? There is only one person/a few people doing all the jobs.
jimbokun 5y ago
I don't know, building the wrong thing in the right way, that never gets used by anyone, sounds kind of depressing to me.
pc86 5y ago
I don't think I've ever seen a more defensive comment on HN. "User" doesn't mean the person clicking around a website. Someone is using your software, I hope?

kdelok 5y ago

> The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project. I strongly agree with this! If you're working towards a product (and not just a hobby project) then these are crucial requirements. If they can be found out before writing any code, then they should be, since it will save time in the long run. For me it's also the kind of thing that can lead to costly changes after the fact, which is prone to rub developers up the wrong way. It seems like the principle of phase containment might apply - if you found it early in the development cycle, then it would have been easier to fix.

woutr_be 5y ago

> From what I can tell, many developers view the development process as a sacred protected space for creation. I think this entirely depends on what kind of people you hire, and what type of environment you put them in. I've worked with developers who's sole focus was on just building whatever they were told, they focused on the technical aspects, and didn't care whether it would be deployed, or if the user would even use it. I've also worked in teams, where everyone was a product engineer, which essentially just means that we focused on building products, and while the tech side was important, it was more important to make sure the product got build, and eventually used. We often worked side by side with our business teams, marketing and design people, and it was honestly the most fun I've ever had. Knowing that I was building something that people were actually going to use, just motivated and excited me.

itsmemattchung 5y ago

> The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project. Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX. Up until a couple months ago, I thought Marketing teams/organizations were a bit hand wavy. But recently, I took a digital marketing course at Georgia Tech, which changed my perspective completely: marketers (can/do/should) apply data driven techniques. As an engineer, I now (at least try) to think about how the feature I'm building will impact the end-user; it's easy to fall into a trap where you are writing code without thinking about your end users.

pawelwentpawel 5y ago
What's your opinion of the Georgia Tech course? I'm just on their website checking out the curriculum, seems pretty straight to the point.
- dempseye 5y ago
  Can you drop the link to it? I'm not sure if you mean the bootcamp.
  - pawelwentpawel 5y ago
    Yes, it seems to be called a bootcamp, not a course. That's what I'm looking at - https://bootcamp.pe.gatech.edu/digitalmarketing/curriculum/ https://bootcamp.pe.gatech.edu/digitalmarketing/curriculum/
  - andrew-nguyen 5y ago
    He's talking about this course in the OMSCS program: https://omscs.gatech.edu/mgt-6311-digital-marketing https://omscs.gatech.edu/mgt-6311-digital-marketing
    - itsmemattchung 5y ago
      Hi Andrew! Thanks for dropping the link for me :)

vbezhenar 5y ago

Many developers don't want to deliver a high-impact product. They want to enjoy the process of creation, earn some reasonable money and make lifes of some people better.

Invictus0 5y ago
> don't want to deliver a high-impact product > earn some reasonable money These two are in opposition
- hasmolo 5y ago
  not really, you can make good money not at a big corp, amd not work on high impact stuff. yelp, intuit, adobe all fit the bill
  - oblio 5y ago
    I like how the definition of Big Corp has changed. > Adobe 22 000 employees. Revenue of $12.86 billion. They're a literal Fortune 500 company (and not that far off from Fortune 200): https://fortune.com/company/adobe-systems/fortune500/ https://fortune.com/company/adobe-systems/fortune500/
    - yunohn 5y ago
      That’s because HN (and the general media) have come to brand just FAANG as evil megacorps. We’ve forgotten about general tech/companies, consulting, fossil/energy, etc etc that are also very very mega.
- derwiki 5y ago
  Not at Megacorp they aren’t
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    Megacorp usually at least starts with a good product that sells well

craftinator 5y ago

I think you may have put yourself at a social disadvantage by using the phrase "high impact product", which is a trigger phrase for several developers I know. It's a trigger phrase because they work at places where hearing that during a meeting means "we are about to throw away a lot of work you've done, because we didn't bother to do any market research before we did the first 6 months of sprint cycles". To them, it just sounds like a lot of low-level manager speak that results in massive technical debt, rushed redesigns, working overtime, and the expectation that "changing software is easy". I found what you said really interesting, and am sharing it with my SO who is a marketing and business contractor. Thank you for sharing!

magicroot75 5y ago
Ah got it. I had no intention of doing that. I do think most of us, marketers or developers would like to make some impact. That impact is not always financial. But marketing is not necessarily always about finances. It's about understanding users/consumers and what gets them excited.

michaelje 5y ago

I agree. 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.

kayodelycaon 5y ago

> I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between ourselves. I fully agree. I've worked with an incredible b2b salesman before. He wasn't very technical, but he was always curious about what was possible and how difficult it would be to accomplish. Going to a conference with him as the technical expert was amazing. Customers were a gold mine for information. We always looked deeper to find the problems to solve, not the features to create. Learned a lot from him. Sadly, I haven't had this dynamic since. Since then, I've run into marketing departments. My issue with them is they constantly switch tools, want immediate results, and destroy site performance without any concern for the path of destruction they leave behind. And marketing is good at selling stuff internally as they are externally. As a result, few people in management care about how marketing impacts anything else in the company. On the flip side, marketing is the first department to be stabbed in the back when numbers come up badly. It's not really a surprise to me they treat other departments as scapegoats pass blame to. Things don't have to be this way. :(

ketzo 5y ago
Engineers tend to have this conception of all salespeople (and, to the point of the GP, marketers) as con-artists: "how can I convince this rube to buy my crap?" When in reality, as you discovered, the best salespeople are the ones who are able to really, truly understand the problems of their customer base and help them find solutions. That is an incredibly special skill, and one that should never be underrated.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I guess the problem is that for every good salesman there's 10 conmen masquerading as good salesmen.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    …and since there's so much overlap in the skillset between a conman and a good salesman, a technical co-founder looking to hire them can't tell the difference. The safest path to avoid hiring a fraud is to create a culture that has disdain for the entire profession.

Swinx43 5y ago

You are absolutely correct. I have been working as an engineer with marketing departments of organisations and the degree to which these two sides can benefit a product or company when working together is phenomenal. "If you build it they will come" is a sure fire way to have your hopes and dreams dashed on the rocks of reality. Marketing is as important as the dev skills to make a product happen. They are two sides of the same coin of success.

edge17 5y ago

Where is that community supposed to form though? I would think those relationships tend to get made in the office, but the environment seems to he going more towards remote.

embwbam 5y ago

How might an experienced solo developer work with an experienced marketer? My network has ended up being very thin in that regard. Would you partner on some developer's zany project? Or are you folks available to consult?

cjf101 5y ago

I strongly agree with the heart of what you are saying. One of the worst bugs you can have in a product is to have built the wrong product. A good channel of communication between people who understand the customer and people who are building and designing the product is not just valuable: it's critical. There can be communication challenges between our disciplines though. Frequent changes in direction can leave software in a bit of a shambles. This is probably the thing that creates the feeling that development is "a sacred space for creation". It takes time to both make the change, and end up with code that is pleasant to work with. On teams I've been on, this has sometimes led resistance to the marketing perspective. I, personally, am often uncomfortable with the language of marketing (both on the analysis side, and on the promotion side). On the promotion side, marketing teams like to make claims that are aspirational or appeal to emotional needs, rather than actually true from a technologists perspective. On the analysis side, marketing often looks like it's working from incomplete information, and extrapolating trends that I don't feel confident exist. It feels like guessing, and I don't like to gamble. These can be difficult gaps to bridge, but ultimately, I feel like we have the same goal: building the right thing for the right audience.

syngrog66 5y ago

theres wisdom in what you advise, but I think theres one glitch with the wording which might cause a backlash. what you say a "developer" should be doing/thinking, is really not what a software engineer does or should be doing. you're talking about product development. in a small enough shop where a few people must where all the hats, sure one person might be wearing the product development and software engineering hats. in a larger, more established company, they will not. the vast majority of folks in software engineering should not be thinking in terms of user exitement, or market value or brand positioning etc. if I were a solo indie entrepreneur/engineer who had to wear all the hats I couldnt delegate to others? heck yes I should follow your advice. marketing, product design and UX are all incredibly important. but they are not the responsibility, or anywhere in the top concerns, of a software engineer. for the business overall? heck yes

sanderjd 5y ago

I think you're exactly right about this! But just to provide some insight (which you probably already have) into the mind of a different kind of person: I can both recognize the truth that marketing is critically and synergistically important, and also have just a deep seated allergy to it. I have concluded that being a freelance / independent developer or even a very early stage startup developer is not a great fit for me for this reason. I thrive more when there is lots of work to do that is not deeply attached to marketing a new product.

jvanderbot 5y ago

So how does a solo founder find a marketing enthusiast partner?

z3t4 5y ago

It also goes the other way. As a marketer dont treat marketing as a sacred protected space. Work with the developer as the developer is very good at solving problem and can make sure that the best technology is chosen to reach the marketing goal as efficient as possible.

magicroot75 5y ago
Totally agree!

hippich 5y ago

There is one more possibility (relevant to solo devs) - lack of trust that marketing professionals can deliver results. Personally, I do realize how important marketing is and how inadequate my skills in marketing are. But at the same time, my experience contracting out marketing taught me that there are very few good pros and i am much more likely to at best hire someone who has about the same level of experience as I am. If someone has tips on how to weed out pretenders (who themselves do not realize they are pretending) - I would love to learn about it. Unfortunately, my budget typically is too small to keep hiring until i hit the gold.

ghaff 5y ago
In general, contracting something out can be useful if you have some specific task to perform. We use a bunch of agencies and other outside firms. But it's almost always for something specific like running a webinar series on $X or providing social media tooling or other things like that. Marketing also covers a very wide spectrum. For a small operation, the person you might hire to create content and/or messaging for a product is probably different from the one you would hire to create a digital demand generation program.
- hippich 5y ago
  As a solo developer, one part of the reason to contract marketing is not exactly knowing what i do not know. While I try to keep focus narrow (i.e. optimize "this PPC campaign") I also explain that I know very little about it and hope to leverage experience of the firm doing just that, and if there is anything else that needs to be done - please let me know, don't be a robot executing program exactly as given. So far I did not have much success doing it this way. Each time I have to learn about specific area and only after some understanding, trial and error, I can hire someone who will just follow the steps.
magicroot75 5y ago
I can take a shot at a tip on weeding at pretenders as a marketer: Ask them to describe, in technical detail, what the software does. Ask them about challenges the end user may have going through the process of using it. A bad marketer is all about creating a scummy sales pitch to get a quick buck. A great marketer is there on the frontlines understanding exactly the functions of the software and how they solve the customer's problems in implicit or explicit ways.

bonestamp2 5y ago

> Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX. What do you mean by this? I don't disagree in anyway, just looking for your insights.

winternett 5y ago

I too want to work with a marketer for my web design business, but I've found that many simply want to do early stage lead generation and then "drop" the clients over to me as a client manager, which doesn't reassure clients that marketing promises will be upheld... I think the best (development) marketers are people who invest in learning the nuances of the business (e.g. knowing there are quite distinct differences between coding in ASP.Net and PHP). The same can be said for tech recruiters... aY yAY yAy... lol. As a dev I had to learn marketing inversely, to allow me to better understand the process of ensuring clients a smooth and trust-worthy process... In running my business I have to daily be involved in absolutely every aspect of it (without being too controlling of course) because managing delivery and client experience is a key to gaining and retaining new and follow-up work. The best method of self-marketing/promoting I've found is to build my own products/portfolios that represent what would be useful and engaging to new potential clients. Working product demos also help marketers to better be acquainted with what they are ultimately selling, and make intuitive screen shots and presentations of the products in support of their efforts. That way I also have a template I can build quicker from, but I also demonstrate to clients that I can actually do the work. IT is far too complex in presentation these days; many clients are not focused on tech stacks, methods, tools, services, or things developers are usually focused on. Modern clients are usually most concerned about their requirements and business needs, a marketer should focus on being a translator in a way when it comes to marketing development work, linking that work to productivity, progress, and things that satisfy requirements and provide benefits in a clear and usually less-technically inclined manner than a developer would detail a solution... E.G.... We keep selling "the cloud" to everyone, but if you ask a client what "cloud" is they simply don't know/don't really care what it really is, as long as it fulfills their business goals. In a world where people are using imagery alone to market their capability, the real working examples of what we do as a company are often what wins us new work.... Even if we don't win new work, the products we build usually end up being valuable and highly useful to us ultimately in real life.

moneywoes 5y ago

Are there any good marketing resources you would suggest to founders? Is knowing how to build an effective Facebook add campaign key or is a focus on SEO especially BLB ( back link building ) paramount? Any blogs?

thecleaner 5y ago

I am an engineer but I admire marketing folks and their contributions to the development process. It adds valuable data points to the decision process. Are there any resources you would recommend for devs to get a hang of the marketing process / methods ? This will help us better understand marketing folks.

Khelavaster 5y ago

The challenge is: "how will a group of potential users trust this feature enough to try it after seeing advertisement?" Targetted development is straightforward with a userbase..