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The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers

73 points by ca98am79 12y ago

danso 12y ago
I upvoted this mostly for the headline...I don't know if the piece was just difficult to follow or if I'm just hurting from lack of sleep...but the OP needed a few more specifics because on a quick read, it sounds like they just need devs that can quickly scaffold prototypes, which they use to test out concepts and also, try to sell the bosses on their big idea. OK...without getting into "when is a web developer also an actual engineer?" debate...what do these engineers do when the marketers don't have any big ideas at the moment? Engineers on an engineering team ostensibly always have something to work and iterate on, directly...but if they're at the behest to the marketing team, then that's not a particularly agile process. Well, I mean it could be, but then you've set up a shadow engineering team that is basically staked with creating whizbang ideas to compete with what the non-marketing-engineers are toiling to maintain. Actually, if I were in the non-marketing team, I'd find that quite annoying, as the old-cash-cow is always more annoying than what the bleeding-edge dev team is working on. But this is even worse than the Apple ][ team competing with the Macintosh team...the marketing-engineering team, in the OP's description, could really go down the road of creating plausible vaporware, sucking the attention of the company management. The OP does give a good real-life example of what the marketing-engineers can do: a documentation portal for API developers, and visualization tools...two things that could be from the main engineering department but could also be completely separate...yet require key technical skills. But in that case, it's often just kind of another engineering team, at a mid-to-large-sized company that may have several teams (like how Google has search, local, social, whatever Peter Norvig works on, etc). I guess I just don't see many situations in which building out such a parallel engineering team would be feasible for most startups, where the duplication of certain infrastructure and procedures is far more costly than it is for an established company.
- rationalthug 12y ago
  In a similar way, a separate marketing tech team can also create tension with the rest of the developers when marketing gains control over various parts of a site/service due to clear success in moving the revenue needle. There's almost nothing more frustrating for a developer than starting on a great product concept, but being told to drop it because marketing doesn't want such a product or feature to interfere with what they're doing (A/B testing, etc.)
- ripter 12y ago
  The place I work at does this. There is Core Engineering and Agency. I'm on Core Engineering and we build the products. The Agency engineers figure out cool ways to use the products. Like they did a live celebrity selfies for the Oscars. Are customers building things for the Oscars? Not really, but it shows the power of our products and helps marketing/sales. Which in turn let's core engineering experiment and contribute to open source projects. That leads to better products (and happy engineers.) Agency uses those new/better products to repeat the cycle all over again.
- jontas 12y ago
  I am the web developer who works for the marketing team described in the article. I don't really know where (or if) to draw the line between web developer and engineer, but in my career before taking this job I was the lead developer on dozens of large, complex web applications that went way beyond your standard brochure website. I never felt that the kind of stuff I was working on was somehow less important or not real "engineering". As for your the other points you raise about what to do when the marketing team is out of work: perhaps that would be an issue at other companies with less growth, but so far in about three years total working with Knewton (as a contractor and then as a full time employee) there has never been a moment where any of us were struggling to find something to do. There is a constant flow of large projects and firedrills and plenty of work to do in the icebox. These are projects that are important to the company's growth and vision, but would distract the product engineering teams from their jobs. The product teams have their sprints planned out and aren't able to punt on an important feature because the biz dev team needs help building a mock application for a meeting next week. The marketing team has the ability to set our own priorities and timelines and adjust those as the business's needs change. We are better able to react to emergencies than larger teams because we aren't beholden to clients and product managers to meet timelines established months ago. I am not trying to criticize how the other teams work--I understand the benefits of that workflow, and I can't imagine how you'd build large, complex applications without that kind of organization. However, for the kind of projects the marketing team handles, that sort of organization would be more of a hinderance.
walshemj 12y ago
That would be nice unfortunately marketing doesn't value technical resource at all. I am far too professional to tell tales but I know of large companies that have wasted millions on poorly executed systems.
- cratermoon 12y ago
  This guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
- walshemj 12y ago
  Hmm down voted eh BTW I had my boss a director of a global 500 subsidiary say exactly the same thing to me.
  - dohertyjf 12y ago
    I didn't downvote you, but it's likely because you made a broad sweeping generalization about marketers not valuing technical skills. I'm a technical marketer (director level). I know lots of them. *edited for untrue statements
gerbal 12y ago
I was recently talking to a founder about his small startup. They had initially hired a Marketer to help build audience and publicize their product. But what they discovered is that they weren't ready to have a dedicated Marketer. With only two developers the time needed to support the marketer was detracting from developing the projects. Now he's looking for a Marketing Engineer, someone who can fill the role of marketer, developer, and product engineer. While not be as good at any of these tasks as a dedicated professional, someone who can fill in the cracks is more useful to a new startup.
- austinhutch 12y ago
  This is how I generally try and position myself and I think more and more startups will find this type of role valuable, but as of now I don't see many startups that are explicitly looking for this type of early employee.
  - gerbal 12y ago
    I think it's one of those roles startups don't know they need until it's a little too late.
  - joshyeager 12y ago
    Where are you located? My company is currently working to improve our marketing, and it would help a lot to have someone who can both set marketing strategy and implement it, instead of just one or the other.
- Swizec 12y ago
  These are usually called "growth hackers".
  - gerbal 12y ago
    It's a personal preference, but I think the term "growth hacker" is fairly silly. It sound like an unskilled oncologist.
- drumdance 12y ago
smacktoward 12y ago
This seems more like a description of management failure than of a need for marketing to have its own engineers. If the problem is that marketing and engineering can't talk to each other, the solution is for management to be able to talk to both of them, not for people whose skills would put them in one group to be embedded in the other. Going that way just creates "B teams": the good engineers (the "A team") are in Engineering; the ones Engineering doesn't want get shunted over to Marketing to get them out of the way. Which doesn't do Marketing any favors, since those are the ones least likely to be able to understand what Engineering is doing in the first place.
- jontas 12y ago
  That isn't how it works at all. As per TFA, marketing interviews and hires their own talent, and there isn't any crossover between the engineering and marketing team staffing.
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    Right, that's how it should work in theory. In practice though, marketing doesn't have the capability to interview and hire their own engineering talent. How can they, when they are marketers? How is a marketing manager supposed to do, say, a code review? So what happens in practice is exactly what smacktoward described: the B-level engineers are sent to the marketing department because Engineering doesn't want them around.
    - apalmer 12y ago
      Thats making a lot of assumptions here. Honestly the opposite is just as likely to happen. If marketing has a better 'manager'/'lead'/'architect' and is offering better pay and more interesting work, I have seen where the 'B' team becomes more effective than the 'A' team. What it does always do is bifurcate your technical staff...
    - jontas 12y ago
      I don't understand how you can say that is what happens in practice when the article (and me, personally) is proof of the exact opposite. As I mentioned in a different comment, I am the developer working for the marketing team described in this article. My boss, the director of marketing, knows when to reach out for assistance and wouldn't presume to make technical decisions that are outside of his area of expertise. He happens to be one of the more technically proficient marketers I've worked with, but even if he wasn't that doesn't mean he is doomed to make poor decisions in isolation. At Knewton, someone who was not up to standards wouldn't be shifted out of the way to another department, they would be let go. That is a pretty rare occurance because the hiring standards are strict (in my opinion, maybe too strict, I think we get a lot of false negatives, but that is another topic). Any company that had a policy of sticking another department with an employee they disliked would not last long because you'd end up with a lot of poor talent being shuffled all over the place.
hyperliner 12y ago
In most companies I have worked on, marketing has had its own engineers. It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. In this world, technical problems occur everywhere in a company. The question is whether those problems are best solved by centralizing all devs in a single org or distributing them where needed. In large companies, marketing is one of the largest spenders of technical / application budgets and resources. They need to run applications and experiments for usability, design and revenue generation. The problem appears to be conflict with "product" devs because of the common surface they must work on (the site, new feature testing, etc.) I think the main issue here, regardless of small startup vs large company, is what org is responsible for what. I see in the article some sentiment of "finger pointing" which indicates to me that people have not answer that question. Once that question is answered, it would seem to be the accountable people should be free to design the best way to get something done. There will always be conflicts (some junior devs or product managers launch a tiny irrelevant feature and want marketing to stop everything to "tell the world about it," or product marketing wants Dev to prioritize some features higher because of revenue, without necessarily realizing the implementation complexities). Fingerprinting is easy. Designing orgs and communication for tough problems is not easy.
- apalmer 12y ago
  I think this post is closest aligned to my understanding of the situation. Literally marketing needs a lot of technical work done, they have enough funding and influence that they can hire their own technical staff instead of 'queuing' up work requests from the centralized technical staff. Depending on your frame of reference this is either a management failure, or a nimble 'multitasking' management structure. I would probably come down on 'management failure' but thats very subjective.
- korzun 12y ago
  > It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. I hope your next medical procedure is done by a surgeon hired by the hospitals marketing team. Good luck.
  - hyperliner 12y ago
jqueryin 12y ago
I think a lot of startups already end up devoting a portion of developer resources to marketing related optimizations. I know I've always ended up going this route when marketing needed something to make their jobs simpler or have a way to access data more easily. For a few examples of marketing related things we've recently completed in the pipeline: * Continuous improvement of page event tracking which marketing uses in their decision making * Addition of inbound tracking codes to analyze performance of marketing campaigns * Updated our email templating build system to be marketing friendly; they can update and create email templates on their own without our help. * Created marketing specific KPIs on our administrative panel. * Added in depth reporting of site and user usage. The list really goes on and on. If marketing needs something and it's deemed a high enough priority, it happens.
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
I'm not sold. The first thing you see on Knewton's page is 'Every education leader needs an adaptive learning infrastructure'. Then you have a buzzword car crash with 'Adaptive Ontology', 'Model Computation Engine', etc. It's a good bet that most people - education leaders included - know nothing about ML. So what they see here is a page of jargon they don't understand, and some social proof (not so bad, but a bit late.) You don't get a plain English benefit statement - 'See how Knewton improves student achievement' - until you scroll to the bottom of the page and/or start clicking through to the next pages. Is this design really the result of user analytics? Did the page say something like 'We help your students learn", but that was taken down because it didn't get conversions? Bottom line - I'd be surprised if the content on this page makes it easier to sell the product to first-time visitors. (And it looks like an interesting product. But I can guess what the words mean, so I'm probably not a typical customer.) I'm open to the idea that marketing needs engineering, and vice versa. But I'd suggest that more than anything, start-ups need a good customer champion who can step outside the company culture to provide evidence-based reviews of marketing materials and products as customers see them - not as marketing or engineering want them to be seen. Analytics may not be enough, because you can't be sure you're asking the right questions and mis-optimizing for a small local maximum while missing something important elsewhere.
korzun 12y ago
They should have their 'own' engineers but those engineers should be part of core engineering team and allocated by that team. I actually went thought this and the company went from doing something cool to doing mediocre stuff you would expect in 2002. Marketing hires bunch of 'amazing/rockstars' they used to work with. They were basically junior level engineers. Created their own cluster of mediocrity within the company. Then we hired a weak CTO, the VP of Marketing ran him over; taking over tech with an amazingly weak team of people we would never hire. TLDR: Don't let people who don't understand technology, run technology.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  I offer one tweak: what is the value of the CTO in your scenario? Probably nothing. Why is it necessary for engineers to work in a central engineering function? Why not closer to the problem (in this case marketing) where they can be the stars and not just a "shared resource"? The problem with the shared resource model is then that Marketing can just decide to hire outsourced engineers as contractors and then the know-how is not kept in the company.
mathattack 12y ago
Great article! Some top companies have created positions called "Marketing Analysts" who bridge the gap. Usually they are from engineering or IT, but sit with the Marketers. They frequently transition in full time Marketing positions too.
joshfraser 12y ago
I'd take it one step further - your VP of marketing should be an engineer. The fastest companies I know today have a ton of engineers dedicated to their marketing efforts. It's not enough to have the best product. You have to be able to find and acquire customers in a affordable and repeatable way. A non-technical marketer will say "I was thinking about it all night, and I like this wording the best". A technical marketer will say, "I tested 100 variations and these 3 performed the best. Let's try and optimize them even more." That's not to say there isn't a place for creativity and intuitive decision making, but a good marketer will always be seeking data to validate their hypothesis. If you don't have a technical VP of marketing, the engineers should report to the CTO and should treat the marketing team as their customer.
- josephschmoe 12y ago
  This sounds like we need a change in how marketing is approached - you don't need to be an engineer to do A/B testing. I would be more worried that there are simply very few great marketers with an engineering background, due to filtering - and the fact that engineers generally don't have any incentive to go into marketing.
  - joshfraser 12y ago
    While it's true that analytical minds aren't exclusive to engineers, knowing how to code makes a big difference in this new world of marketing. Want to create customized ads for each zip code that link to similarly personalized landing pages? Want to track and analyze those results then retarget certain cohorts of users across the web? Understanding how the technology works and being able to implement it yourself will give you a huge advantage.
    - larrys 12y ago
      "makes a big difference in this new world of marketing." What world are you talking about? The startup world? There is a big big world of marketing that exists separate from startups, YC, and venture invested companies. Edit: AKA "the echo chamber"
MrQuincle 12y ago
Marketing is one, but just fancy websites is not gonna cut it of course. The PR guys at, say a company like Heineken, can spent a lot of money on TV advertisements. It would be great if a bit of that money can be spent on future technological products. Say, a robot that brings you beer on the beach. They have nice PR and the world has spent some more resources on developing technology, rather than cool computer graphics for a clip. Of course, companies are already doing this more and more. Amazon's drones have been more marketing that anything else. I don't complain. Anyway, I diverged.
ianstormtaylor 12y ago
I would be really curious if anyone here has tried a bit of the reverse. Instead of having engineers on the Marketing team, have you tried having marketers on the Product team, so that a team working on a single feature consists of a few engineers, a designer and a marketer? That way the feature can be designed, built, launched and tweaked all with the same group of people. There's still a problem of "home" and "features" page type things.
rbanffy 12y ago
I could easily defend the idea that engineering should have it's own marketeers...

73 points by ca98am79 12y ago

danso 12y ago

I upvoted this mostly for the headline...I don't know if the piece was just difficult to follow or if I'm just hurting from lack of sleep...but the OP needed a few more specifics because on a quick read, it sounds like they just need devs that can quickly scaffold prototypes, which they use to test out concepts and also, try to sell the bosses on their big idea. OK...without getting into "when is a web developer also an actual engineer?" debate...what do these engineers do when the marketers don't have any big ideas at the moment? Engineers on an engineering team ostensibly always have something to work and iterate on, directly...but if they're at the behest to the marketing team, then that's not a particularly agile process. Well, I mean it could be, but then you've set up a shadow engineering team that is basically staked with creating whizbang ideas to compete with what the non-marketing-engineers are toiling to maintain. Actually, if I were in the non-marketing team, I'd find that quite annoying, as the old-cash-cow is always more annoying than what the bleeding-edge dev team is working on. But this is even worse than the Apple ][ team competing with the Macintosh team...the marketing-engineering team, in the OP's description, could really go down the road of creating plausible vaporware, sucking the attention of the company management. The OP does give a good real-life example of what the marketing-engineers can do: a documentation portal for API developers, and visualization tools...two things that could be from the main engineering department but could also be completely separate...yet require key technical skills. But in that case, it's often just kind of another engineering team, at a mid-to-large-sized company that may have several teams (like how Google has search, local, social, whatever Peter Norvig works on, etc). I guess I just don't see many situations in which building out such a parallel engineering team would be feasible for most startups, where the duplication of certain infrastructure and procedures is far more costly than it is for an established company.

rationalthug 12y ago
In a similar way, a separate marketing tech team can also create tension with the rest of the developers when marketing gains control over various parts of a site/service due to clear success in moving the revenue needle. There's almost nothing more frustrating for a developer than starting on a great product concept, but being told to drop it because marketing doesn't want such a product or feature to interfere with what they're doing (A/B testing, etc.)
ripter 12y ago
The place I work at does this. There is Core Engineering and Agency. I'm on Core Engineering and we build the products. The Agency engineers figure out cool ways to use the products. Like they did a live celebrity selfies for the Oscars. Are customers building things for the Oscars? Not really, but it shows the power of our products and helps marketing/sales. Which in turn let's core engineering experiment and contribute to open source projects. That leads to better products (and happy engineers.) Agency uses those new/better products to repeat the cycle all over again.
jontas 12y ago
I am the web developer who works for the marketing team described in the article. I don't really know where (or if) to draw the line between web developer and engineer, but in my career before taking this job I was the lead developer on dozens of large, complex web applications that went way beyond your standard brochure website. I never felt that the kind of stuff I was working on was somehow less important or not real "engineering". As for your the other points you raise about what to do when the marketing team is out of work: perhaps that would be an issue at other companies with less growth, but so far in about three years total working with Knewton (as a contractor and then as a full time employee) there has never been a moment where any of us were struggling to find something to do. There is a constant flow of large projects and firedrills and plenty of work to do in the icebox. These are projects that are important to the company's growth and vision, but would distract the product engineering teams from their jobs. The product teams have their sprints planned out and aren't able to punt on an important feature because the biz dev team needs help building a mock application for a meeting next week. The marketing team has the ability to set our own priorities and timelines and adjust those as the business's needs change. We are better able to react to emergencies than larger teams because we aren't beholden to clients and product managers to meet timelines established months ago. I am not trying to criticize how the other teams work--I understand the benefits of that workflow, and I can't imagine how you'd build large, complex applications without that kind of organization. However, for the kind of projects the marketing team handles, that sort of organization would be more of a hinderance.

walshemj 12y ago

That would be nice unfortunately marketing doesn't value technical resource at all. I am far too professional to tell tales but I know of large companies that have wasted millions on poorly executed systems.

cratermoon 12y ago
This guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
walshemj 12y ago
Hmm down voted eh BTW I had my boss a director of a global 500 subsidiary say exactly the same thing to me.
- dohertyjf 12y ago
  I didn't downvote you, but it's likely because you made a broad sweeping generalization about marketers not valuing technical skills. I'm a technical marketer (director level). I know lots of them. *edited for untrue statements

gerbal 12y ago

I was recently talking to a founder about his small startup. They had initially hired a Marketer to help build audience and publicize their product. But what they discovered is that they weren't ready to have a dedicated Marketer. With only two developers the time needed to support the marketer was detracting from developing the projects. Now he's looking for a Marketing Engineer, someone who can fill the role of marketer, developer, and product engineer. While not be as good at any of these tasks as a dedicated professional, someone who can fill in the cracks is more useful to a new startup.

austinhutch 12y ago
This is how I generally try and position myself and I think more and more startups will find this type of role valuable, but as of now I don't see many startups that are explicitly looking for this type of early employee.
- gerbal 12y ago
  I think it's one of those roles startups don't know they need until it's a little too late.
- joshyeager 12y ago
  Where are you located? My company is currently working to improve our marketing, and it would help a lot to have someone who can both set marketing strategy and implement it, instead of just one or the other.
Swizec 12y ago
These are usually called "growth hackers".
- gerbal 12y ago
  It's a personal preference, but I think the term "growth hacker" is fairly silly. It sound like an unskilled oncologist.
drumdance 12y ago

smacktoward 12y ago

This seems more like a description of management failure than of a need for marketing to have its own engineers. If the problem is that marketing and engineering can't talk to each other, the solution is for management to be able to talk to both of them, not for people whose skills would put them in one group to be embedded in the other. Going that way just creates "B teams": the good engineers (the "A team") are in Engineering; the ones Engineering doesn't want get shunted over to Marketing to get them out of the way. Which doesn't do Marketing any favors, since those are the ones least likely to be able to understand what Engineering is doing in the first place.

jontas 12y ago
That isn't how it works at all. As per TFA, marketing interviews and hires their own talent, and there isn't any crossover between the engineering and marketing team staffing.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  Right, that's how it should work in theory. In practice though, marketing doesn't have the capability to interview and hire their own engineering talent. How can they, when they are marketers? How is a marketing manager supposed to do, say, a code review? So what happens in practice is exactly what smacktoward described: the B-level engineers are sent to the marketing department because Engineering doesn't want them around.
  - apalmer 12y ago
    Thats making a lot of assumptions here. Honestly the opposite is just as likely to happen. If marketing has a better 'manager'/'lead'/'architect' and is offering better pay and more interesting work, I have seen where the 'B' team becomes more effective than the 'A' team. What it does always do is bifurcate your technical staff...
  - jontas 12y ago
    I don't understand how you can say that is what happens in practice when the article (and me, personally) is proof of the exact opposite. As I mentioned in a different comment, I am the developer working for the marketing team described in this article. My boss, the director of marketing, knows when to reach out for assistance and wouldn't presume to make technical decisions that are outside of his area of expertise. He happens to be one of the more technically proficient marketers I've worked with, but even if he wasn't that doesn't mean he is doomed to make poor decisions in isolation. At Knewton, someone who was not up to standards wouldn't be shifted out of the way to another department, they would be let go. That is a pretty rare occurance because the hiring standards are strict (in my opinion, maybe too strict, I think we get a lot of false negatives, but that is another topic). Any company that had a policy of sticking another department with an employee they disliked would not last long because you'd end up with a lot of poor talent being shuffled all over the place.

hyperliner 12y ago

In most companies I have worked on, marketing has had its own engineers. It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. In this world, technical problems occur everywhere in a company. The question is whether those problems are best solved by centralizing all devs in a single org or distributing them where needed. In large companies, marketing is one of the largest spenders of technical / application budgets and resources. They need to run applications and experiments for usability, design and revenue generation. The problem appears to be conflict with "product" devs because of the common surface they must work on (the site, new feature testing, etc.) I think the main issue here, regardless of small startup vs large company, is what org is responsible for what. I see in the article some sentiment of "finger pointing" which indicates to me that people have not answer that question. Once that question is answered, it would seem to be the accountable people should be free to design the best way to get something done. There will always be conflicts (some junior devs or product managers launch a tiny irrelevant feature and want marketing to stop everything to "tell the world about it," or product marketing wants Dev to prioritize some features higher because of revenue, without necessarily realizing the implementation complexities). Fingerprinting is easy. Designing orgs and communication for tough problems is not easy.

apalmer 12y ago
I think this post is closest aligned to my understanding of the situation. Literally marketing needs a lot of technical work done, they have enough funding and influence that they can hire their own technical staff instead of 'queuing' up work requests from the centralized technical staff. Depending on your frame of reference this is either a management failure, or a nimble 'multitasking' management structure. I would probably come down on 'management failure' but thats very subjective.
korzun 12y ago
> It's not like engineering has a monopoly on hiring technical talent. I hope your next medical procedure is done by a surgeon hired by the hospitals marketing team. Good luck.
- hyperliner 12y ago

jqueryin 12y ago

I think a lot of startups already end up devoting a portion of developer resources to marketing related optimizations. I know I've always ended up going this route when marketing needed something to make their jobs simpler or have a way to access data more easily. For a few examples of marketing related things we've recently completed in the pipeline: * Continuous improvement of page event tracking which marketing uses in their decision making * Addition of inbound tracking codes to analyze performance of marketing campaigns * Updated our email templating build system to be marketing friendly; they can update and create email templates on their own without our help. * Created marketing specific KPIs on our administrative panel. * Added in depth reporting of site and user usage. The list really goes on and on. If marketing needs something and it's deemed a high enough priority, it happens.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

I'm not sold. The first thing you see on Knewton's page is 'Every education leader needs an adaptive learning infrastructure'. Then you have a buzzword car crash with 'Adaptive Ontology', 'Model Computation Engine', etc. It's a good bet that most people - education leaders included - know nothing about ML. So what they see here is a page of jargon they don't understand, and some social proof (not so bad, but a bit late.) You don't get a plain English benefit statement - 'See how Knewton improves student achievement' - until you scroll to the bottom of the page and/or start clicking through to the next pages. Is this design really the result of user analytics? Did the page say something like 'We help your students learn", but that was taken down because it didn't get conversions? Bottom line - I'd be surprised if the content on this page makes it easier to sell the product to first-time visitors. (And it looks like an interesting product. But I can guess what the words mean, so I'm probably not a typical customer.) I'm open to the idea that marketing needs engineering, and vice versa. But I'd suggest that more than anything, start-ups need a good customer champion who can step outside the company culture to provide evidence-based reviews of marketing materials and products as customers see them - not as marketing or engineering want them to be seen. Analytics may not be enough, because you can't be sure you're asking the right questions and mis-optimizing for a small local maximum while missing something important elsewhere.

korzun 12y ago

They should have their 'own' engineers but those engineers should be part of core engineering team and allocated by that team. I actually went thought this and the company went from doing something cool to doing mediocre stuff you would expect in 2002. Marketing hires bunch of 'amazing/rockstars' they used to work with. They were basically junior level engineers. Created their own cluster of mediocrity within the company. Then we hired a weak CTO, the VP of Marketing ran him over; taking over tech with an amazingly weak team of people we would never hire. TLDR: Don't let people who don't understand technology, run technology.

hyperliner 12y ago
I offer one tweak: what is the value of the CTO in your scenario? Probably nothing. Why is it necessary for engineers to work in a central engineering function? Why not closer to the problem (in this case marketing) where they can be the stars and not just a "shared resource"? The problem with the shared resource model is then that Marketing can just decide to hire outsourced engineers as contractors and then the know-how is not kept in the company.

mathattack 12y ago

Great article! Some top companies have created positions called "Marketing Analysts" who bridge the gap. Usually they are from engineering or IT, but sit with the Marketers. They frequently transition in full time Marketing positions too.

joshfraser 12y ago

I'd take it one step further - your VP of marketing should be an engineer. The fastest companies I know today have a ton of engineers dedicated to their marketing efforts. It's not enough to have the best product. You have to be able to find and acquire customers in a affordable and repeatable way. A non-technical marketer will say "I was thinking about it all night, and I like this wording the best". A technical marketer will say, "I tested 100 variations and these 3 performed the best. Let's try and optimize them even more." That's not to say there isn't a place for creativity and intuitive decision making, but a good marketer will always be seeking data to validate their hypothesis. If you don't have a technical VP of marketing, the engineers should report to the CTO and should treat the marketing team as their customer.

josephschmoe 12y ago
This sounds like we need a change in how marketing is approached - you don't need to be an engineer to do A/B testing. I would be more worried that there are simply very few great marketers with an engineering background, due to filtering - and the fact that engineers generally don't have any incentive to go into marketing.
- joshfraser 12y ago
  While it's true that analytical minds aren't exclusive to engineers, knowing how to code makes a big difference in this new world of marketing. Want to create customized ads for each zip code that link to similarly personalized landing pages? Want to track and analyze those results then retarget certain cohorts of users across the web? Understanding how the technology works and being able to implement it yourself will give you a huge advantage.
  - larrys 12y ago
    "makes a big difference in this new world of marketing." What world are you talking about? The startup world? There is a big big world of marketing that exists separate from startups, YC, and venture invested companies. Edit: AKA "the echo chamber"

MrQuincle 12y ago

Marketing is one, but just fancy websites is not gonna cut it of course. The PR guys at, say a company like Heineken, can spent a lot of money on TV advertisements. It would be great if a bit of that money can be spent on future technological products. Say, a robot that brings you beer on the beach. They have nice PR and the world has spent some more resources on developing technology, rather than cool computer graphics for a clip. Of course, companies are already doing this more and more. Amazon's drones have been more marketing that anything else. I don't complain. Anyway, I diverged.

ianstormtaylor 12y ago

I would be really curious if anyone here has tried a bit of the reverse. Instead of having engineers on the Marketing team, have you tried having marketers on the Product team, so that a team working on a single feature consists of a few engineers, a designer and a marketer? That way the feature can be designed, built, launched and tweaked all with the same group of people. There's still a problem of "home" and "features" page type things.

rbanffy 12y ago

I could easily defend the idea that engineering should have it's own marketeers...