Why Engineers and Marketers are the perfect allies
If you type on Google “Engineers and Marketers” first entries titles talk about conflict and others about peace. It looks like Engineers and Marketers are in a war.
I studied electrical engineer at University but, some time ago, I discovered my other passion, marketing. I’ve been working as a marketing manager for three years now although I still love to spend some time among wires and code. In the end, the best way to sell your product is to know how it works and using it (eat your own dog food)
In this blog post, I’ll talk about my experience working at Yeti and how the marketing team and engineers work together to achieve the same goal, people using and paying for your product.
What Marketer and Engineers do?
The main goal for marketers is showing the value and benefits that your product has for your targeted audience. So, they will end up purchasing and using it.
On the other hand. In the same way, engineers are in charge of developing, maintaining and improving the product that your customers are paying for.
In the end, engineers want to develop a product they are proud of and marketers want to show the value it has and sell it.
When does the conflict begin?
Conflicts can emerge in different ways. I’ll explain some conflicts that I’m sure they sound familiar to you.
“We can’t promote everything you develop”
Let’s say that you work for a software company. Then I want you to imagine a group of developers who are working day and night in a feature for one of the software products. This enhancement will improve the reliability and stability of the software.
Now, the marketing team needs to evaluate if that feature can be promoted or on the contrary, it can’t because it isn’t valuable and useful for all our users.
Finally, the marketing team decides that they can’t promote this feature because there is only one part of our customers who complained and it isn’t something they will notice.
I’m sure that, the development team will be frustrated unless we know how to deal with this situation. Although we can’t promote this software update to all our users, we can contact those users who were complaining about reliability and stability and talk to them to get some feedback and appreciation for the work we’ve done.
We must know that everything that a product team develops can’t be promoted by the marketing team but, we must find a way to get the value of every action we take.
“Customers are reporting something that must be a priority”
Sometimes, marketing and customer team wrongly believe that customer is always right and we must obey what [s]he said.
So, whenever customers start reporting something it becomes a high priority for marketers and customer support team.
However, we can’t forget that our users aren’t always right. We must be able to filter all request and prioritize those that are aligned with our current interests.
The marketing team is in charge of getting customers requests, filter them and finally plan with development team a roadmap to accomplish all those requests.
“Go back to reality”
It’s normal that when you are so immersed in your product you lose the notion of reality.
Because of that, your team (any team in the company) sometimes can’t provide the reality of your application. You may think that some features are really important for your new users or something inside the app is obvious to use. However, reality could be the opposite.
To help you in this matter, you must get the support of your users. Ask them and don’t be afraid. I’m sure you’ll get a dose of reality.
Communication
When you are in a company, communication between departments is mandatory.
Having a common roadmap will let us know what we are developing and how we are going to promote it.
This is only a piece of the cake about what I learned working in Yeti. I hope you like it!
Engineers and Marketer are the perfect allies
