The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers

http://firstround.com/article/The-Case-for-Why-Marketing-Should-Have-Its-Own-Engineers

by ca98am79 • 12 years ago

73 49 12 years ago

danso• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

jontas3• 12 years 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.

walshemj2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

This guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

walshemj2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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

gerbal3• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

gerbal3• 12 years ago

I think it's one of those roles startups don't know they need until it's a little too late.

joshyeager• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

These are usually called "growth hackers".

gerbal3• 12 years ago

It's a personal preference, but I think the term "growth hacker" is fairly silly. It sound like an unskilled oncologist.

drumdance2• 12 years ago

Please excuse the self promotion, but I just posted something about this kind of scenario today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8038254

hyperliner8• 12 years ago

"Developers needed to support the marketer"

Pretty bad. developers should be supporting the product and the company. Marketers should be supporting the business and the company.

smacktoward• 12 years 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.

jontas3• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

kyllo• 12 years ago

Usually in this case the Marketing folks are no dummies and will spring for an outside hire rather than take the rejects from the IT/Engineering Department. They are often forced to do this because IT cannot grow fast enough to support the business side, and the business stakeholder cannot get an IT "resource" allocated to their project. So they just go hire their own.

But, if the company is actually big enough that Marketing and Engineering have serious problems communicating with each other, perhaps it's time to reorganize into product divisions, so that all the people whose cooperation is needed to perform the daily work to support a given product, are under the same reporting structure, and so that the product team that needs another developer can just hire another developer, rather than having to plead with the IT department to allocate them one.

hyperliner8• 12 years ago

One tweak: sometimes you can solve the problem through establishing the process of decision making and accountability and progress tracking without having to reorg.

dwd• 12 years ago

Currently in the early stage of such a reorganisation.

About a year ago the development team was on a separate floor and communication breakdowns with business were endemic. Treating marketing like a customer didn't work and worse, they would come up with the ideas and we would implement them.

Relocating to the same floor helped and development was more involved with planning and ideas.

We have now gone a step further and organised along product lines with each team consisting of a mix of devs and business (account and project managers). There is still a marketing team who are primarily involved with PR, advertising and social media and sit alongside the database/analytics team.

Devs still report to the Development Manager while Marketing, Business and Accounts report to their respective managers.

Seems to be working so far.

joshdance• 12 years ago

The problem is not that just management needs to be able to talk to both of them, everyone needs to be able to talk to the other group. Having small teams of cross disciplinary skill can work very well, especially with projects of limited scope like marketing automation etc.

hyperliner8• 12 years 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.

apalmer2• 12 years 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.

korzun4• 12 years 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.

hyperliner8• 12 years ago

Yours was a knee-jerk reaction. You did not really read my comment.

It is not the responsibility of the hospital marketing team to perform a medical procedure. They do hire surgeons and medical experts to make sure the hospital capabilities are differentiated from other hospitals. It is their job to compete with other hospitals as patients make their selection process for where to go.

Going back to out real industry, many orgs in a company can hire, and do hire, technical talent. And this technical talent perform their technical function for the org that hired them.

jqueryin• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

korzun4• 12 years 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.

hyperliner8• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

joshfraser2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

joshfraser2• 12 years 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.

larrys2• 12 years ago

"A technical marketer will say, "I tested 100 variations and these 3 performed the best. Let's try and optimize them even more."

I disagree with the idea that "your VP of marketing should be an engineer".

An engineer may be able to test before or after the fact but a real marketer already has a framework to start from that gets you on the dartboard.

All things equal sure it would be nice to have a marketing person who is creative but also an engineer. But the world is not perfect. And the best brain surgeon is rarely also going to specialize in performing heart operations.

I think you are also discounting what I will call "get a law degree" effect. Sometimes the training than one has (or how your brain thinks that even allows you to pursue some profession) is contraindicated in another profession. With a lawyer this would be the tendency once trained like a lawyer to always think of problems as a lawyer would (and not be able to take appropriate chances that a non lawyer might).

Engineers can be creative of course and they could be marketers. But as a generality I don't think the benefits of thinking everything has to be tested and optimized is so clear cut.

hyperliner8• 12 years ago

Well, the VP of Marketing has to be a great marketer. If s/he is also an engineer that is great.

Saying the VP of Marketing should be an engineer is like saying the VP of Engineering should be a marketer.

I think we want to have leaders that scale their functions, are aware of their personal shortcomings, and hire for those. In the case of a VP of Marketing who is not an engineer and in which there is a need for technical investments in the marketing function, let's hope that that person can hire a great technical lead.

It would be the same if we had a VP of engineering with no business foundation. I would hope that person would hire a great product management staff or that he leans on whoever is the business thinker in the company.

I think in general we would hope companies hire for diversity of skills at the time those skills are needed depending on the lifecycle of the company.

MrQuincle• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers

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