What Marketers can Learn from Engineers
Half past noon a colleague of mine, an engineer, enters the office. At the doors, he meets some guy who offers him a handshake, but he ignores him and just walks by; receptionist greets him, smiling welcomingly, but he ignores that too, and just makes his way to the kitchen to grab his morning coffee.
If you saw this picture yourself, you would think the guy is arrogant, but that’s not true. He’s just so deep in his thoughts that he simply doesn’t notice much of what’s going on around him. He spends his time writing code, implementing features, and then just goes on again and again to generate ideas and polish existing implementations in his head where he’s reviewing his work, verifying solutions, checking various use-cases, and coming up with improvements of all sorts.
On the outside it seems as if he’s asleep, but you know, when you’re an engineer, “you’re never really asleep… nor you’re ever really awake”. Being an engineer in past myself, I remember being in such a state of mind very well — when pursuing a solution to some technical problem takes precedence over almost everything else.
You have to admit, engineers are sometimes very different from other people. If you look at their calendar, there’s no seasons or holidays–just squares painted in various shades of green. Lighter squares don’t necessarily mean weekends, just squares–a measure of work done. Engineers seem to exist in the entirely different world, thoroughly hidden from others.
On the inside, this world is full of challenging problems, genious ideas, fancy algorithms, and lots of fascinating things expressed with source code. For engineers, this world by and large is more clear and comprehensible than the one everybody else is living. However, if you think of it more deeply, you’ll arrive at realization that these worlds are closer to each other than you might’ve anticipated.
Our very own everyday lives are greatly affected by the code today. Most of what we do, what we read, how we travel, how we get to the office, and even how we meet our friends–everything “from movies to agriculture to national defense”[1], is at some point defined by some algorithm written by group of engineers.
Back when I was an engineer, I didn’t know much about marketing, so when I joined JetBrains as a Product Marketing Manager, I’ve had to basically reinvent myself and learn a great number of new things. Now you’re probably wondering why they hired me instead of someone else with more experience. This is easier to answer when you get a better understanding of what JetBrains is.
JetBrains is a maker of developer tools–tools made by engineers for engineers. Fifteen years ago, it started when three guys developed a small piece of software, and since then it grew to become one of the industry leaders and today JetBrains products are used by more than two million of developers worldwide, and according to a survey by StackOverflow, at least 30% of IDEs used today are based on the JetBrains IntelliJ platform[2].
When I joined JetBrains four and a half years ago, there were just three Product Marketing Managers, and none of them had a business or marketing degree. Even now, our VP of Marketing is a former QA, and even CEO is an engineer that continues to write code as a part of his job, just like all other top managers of the company do.
Given these facts, JetBrains still continues to grow, staying out of any mergers or acquisitions, and spending less than 3% of its annual revenue on marketing. How is that possible? Good luck? Maybe. Good product? You bet. However, I’m 100% convinced that there’s much more than that. I believe the key role is the mindset of engineers. This mindset just is in JetBrains very DNA–the company founded by engineers, managed by engineers, selling to engineers and promoted mostly by engineers. Well, what’s so special about this engineering mindset?
Being a Product Marketing Manager involves, among other activities, the handling of invites to conferences and other events. The other day we got an invite from a Chinese university to give a talk for their students. The inviting party told us: “You can talk about anything. For example, your product. Today they are students. Tomorrow they might be your users.” Sounds good, but I thought to myself: if I were a student, I’d definitely not like a product promotion in the guise of some technical talk. By then, I shared an office with one of our engineers, so in search for a better solution, I asked him: “What if you went there and spoke about what you do here and why?”. And you know what he told me? “Giving speeches is a waste of time; I better spend it on improving my product. When people see and use it, they’ll understand what’s been done and why.”
At JetBrains there are about ten Product Marketing Managers, and same number of Evangelists. Yes, we do our best to communicate the value of our products (and to educate our users to use them so to say). Yet the most of marketing and evangelism about our products comes from our loyal user base. Who would you rather believe: a marketer you don’t know (and who is paid to promote something), or a colleague of yours who you know and trust?
A very important question here is why they promote our tools (even though we don’t pay them to do that). To answer that, think for a moment of what questions our trust and respect as human beings. We usually get suspicious when someone is promising too much. When they deliver on their promises, our trust grows, and, of course, is lost otherwise. An interesting aspect here is that the bigger of a promise we hear, the bigger trust inflation we experience, and, of course, the bigger damage they suffer when things go awry. That’s exactly what we mean when we say “walk the talk”.
In fact, marketing is not about “talking”, it’s about “walking”. While we may trust words, the only thing we truly respect is action. The value brought by the action is what makes our trust and respect grow.
Engineers are driven by seeking solutions. It’s the beauty of the solution is what they’re after. They are driven by that from the inside. This is what our users and customers value–our dedication to solve technical problems–because it comes from the heart.
The transformation from engineer to marketer (for me) was not really easy process, it felt almost unnatural. Just come think of it. Today I’m working on technical problems, tomorrow I need to be drafting up charts and boosting revenue. A u-turn in both working area and motivation. And if you perceive boosting revenue as “making more people make a purchase”, your perception is wrong.
However, I must admit that this is what many marketers do. In short-term, a manipulative advertisement-based strategy, of course, helps to increase the revenue. In the long-term, it’s not that simple. If you fail to build enough real credibility to back your product, it will damage your reputation. Understanding of this concept made me a better marketer. Funny, the culture of engineers (like ours at JetBrains) helps you learn it very quickly.
Engineers can’t stand being bullshited. When you show them a misleading advertisement, they have very little tolerance for it and will tell you about that in a very straightforward way. This happens (among other reasons) because engineers by far and large are honest, compassionate and stand by their principles. I think that it’s marketers who give “passion” a bad name. They use it heavily in advertising, yet they rarely understand what it truly stands by that.
One day I was at a conference and a guy (I believe he was one of the event organizers), approached me and asked about how it was going and how many “leads” did we get at the booth. In case you don’t know it, “lead” is what marketing people use to describe a potential customer. I looked around, and there was a lot of engineers standing here and there, and suddenly it felt wrong to call them “leads”; “At JetBrains we don’t collect leads” — I replied. “We’re here to talk to our users, listen to their needs, pain-points, and just look them in the eye and ask for their feedback, honest and straightforward”. The guy walked away blushing.
This isn’t a praise for engineers; I am not putting them on a pedestal, because, after all, they’re just people like everyone else. Yet, they’re a good example of people driven from the inside, and this “drive” is what I believe makes companies truly great.
