
The Importance of Mutual Communication Between the R&D and Marketing Teams
As a business grows, it is crucial that otherwise separate departments within the organization actively work to help achieve mutual long-term goals. Despite their unique functions, the Marketing & Sales and Product & Engineering departments are all dependent on one another.
Collaborative companies stress the benefits of teamwork and encourage colleagues to lean on each other for support. Though marketing and sales teams are constantly overwhelmed with their ever-increasing workloads, they need to prioritize regular interaction with product folks and engineers. By sitting in on product team meetings, marketers and salespeople benefit greatly, and vice versa. Each team should maintain a close daily relationship, and help to make communications with one another relevant and productive.
Create a Transparent Workplace
To effectively promote the latest and greatest technology and prepare for a successful public launch, marketers need to thoroughly understand it and stay informed of developments. It is therefore important that your work environment facilitates transparency between engineers, product developers, and marketing professionals.
For example, your tech and marketing teams should plan bi-weekly meetings to catch up and plan the engineering team’s “sprint”. During the meeting, the tech team discusses their upcoming collection of projects and features that the team agrees to complete within a given timeframe. Our sprints currently run in 2-week cycles. In this meeting, tech and marketing provide direct feedback to each other, describing the business benefits of each project and how they should be prioritized. The outcome is a unified vision for the sprint. These types of meetings establish trust between the two teams because everyone works at the same pace, and in the same place, which drastically reduces mistakes due to misunderstandings or miscommunication. Everyone must begin on the exact same page.
Be Realistic When Setting Goals
It would be game-changing if your company’s new product had all the attributes you can imagine. However, the tech team might need two years to build it. At that point, the market may have shifted entirely, leaving the new product out to dry — weighed down by a hefty R&D bill. Marketers should be reasonable when setting mutual goals and allow the tech team to piece projects together. Create a minimum viable product that gets both teams’ ideas in front of customers quickly. Though people often say, “Everyone hates a good compromise”, this expression has no basis in reality. Of utmost importance is balancing between communicating the values of specific features, while also being willing to compromise for the greater good. Call it professional empathy. It also allows the tech team to build more features as the product evolves.
Put Together a Roadmap for your Projects
If you want to make a splash when your technology goes live, don’t wait until the last minute to loop in marketers. Get them involved early and create a project roadmap. Both teams need to prioritize each task to put everyone on the same page. When your tech team involves your marketing in the project roadmap, planning, and prioritization, the team will be better suited to launch a strategic communication plan related to the benefits of new products, both internally and externally. This communication plan also more accurately describes the product due to a greater understanding by all involved departments.
Leverage Customer Feedback Together
When tech teams release new products, we always work closely with the marketing department to gather customer feedback. Engineers are rarely as plugged into the market as they could be. They need to be kept up on the competition, the customer and their feedback, and the undercurrent of the industry. Often times, customers might not care about features you think will be helpful, and other times the customer has a great idea that you’ve never considered. Not just stopping at the complete production phase, but also implementing qualified feedback into the product over time builds significant trust between tech and marketing.The tech and marketing team worked together to gather insight, prioritize the features based on customer feedback and ultimately to produce a more successful minimum viable product right away.
When both teams work together, they can completely transform their industry with new technology! Being transparent, straightforward and realistic ensures that marketing and tech will release products and features that provide real value on an accelerated timeline.
This article originally was posted on my LinkedIn
