Product Marketing for Engineers
github.com
github.com
- “Marketing is evil!” ... perhaps but it’s also a necessary evil if you want anyone using your product
- “Build it and they will come” ... except they won’t unless you tell people
- “I hate spam/push messages/ads therefor everyone else must do to” ... but engineers tend to be the grumpiest about this stuff. Drip marketing to get users to engage progressively with your app, for example, can be valuable to users that even forgot they installed your app in the first place, because something distracted them right after
- “We have all these features / options so let’s so let’s just show them all to the user and let them figure it out” ... paradox of choice etc
And many more. You could _almost_ argue that some jobs, like PM, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer largely exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers... I don’t mean that seriously for obvious reasons but think there’s some truth in it
I think most engineers associate marketing with sleazy SEO/affiliate/self-promotion people who offer little to no added value to the web, society or humanity, who will lie, cheat and steal to make a buck. Most engineers don't want to be like those people in any way, and that's a good thing, because we'd all be better off if those people were gone.
But not all of marketing is "I have a shitty product, it has no encryption, but I will just say that it has super mega NSA encryption because stupid consumers will not know the difference". A lot of marketing is just getting the information out there.
I think it's similar to SEO in that sense. There's the shit that's manipulating Google (and Google is willfully playing along) by just spinning the same text thousands of times and stuffing keywords into it. Everybody would be better off if that disappeared. But there's also the basic common sense SEO. Make sure your HTML works, well, make sure you have your headlines in <h1>, <h2> etc, make sure the important pages you want found can actually be reached with links on your site, make sure your site loads fast etc.
From that perspective, if you are not lying in your marketing, then you must just be telling truths about your product. So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words?
Obviously this doesn't work for most people. Long feature lists can even be a turn off. But I think software people often see products through the lens of what it can do instead of how it makes them feel. That is the hurdle I think a lot of us have to get over because we are so used to writing code to make programs do things and not to make people feel things (I can't imagine how that unit test looks).
From the perspective of an engineer this works really well if your target market is also engineers, in a very clearly defined vertical market for a highly technical product. Such as components for UAVs or DWDM transport systems.
Some engineers choose specifically to work for companies in a niche field because they find it easier and less stressful to also deal with customers who are their respective companies' subject matter experts on the subsystem.
As a side note, this is why landing pages exist. Another marketing gimmick of course, but having separate pages that people won't reach by mistake lets the message suit the audience. I struggled with that concept for a long time. Shouldn't every page on our site be nicely accessible from a menu just like the contents page of a book? Not always. Give the wrong first impression and you might not get another.
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One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted.
Two, professional specialization. I sometimes quip, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough levels of indirection". I mean it. There's plenty of entrepreneurs who wouldn't feel comfortable going to someone personally and lying about their product, or spying on them and selling what they learned to a scammer. But if such entrepreneur hires a marketing manager, who then outsources all marketing to an external agency, which buys its tools off-the-shelf, you may suddenly end up with lies in ads and 50 megabytes of trackers on your GDPR-violating website, and at no point each individual's conscience crosses the "this is EVIL" threshold; everyone can point at each other and say, "I'm just doing what I'm paid to", or "I didn't know my subordinates/subcontractors would do that".
I have recently learned here on HN, that this is called a Red Queen's race. Since like me everyone on HN loves expressive language I am spreading the word.
The fence sitters on the marketplace might ask both A and B of their experiences and opinions. They will then calibrate that against A and B marketing. Maybe one or two customers might be random, but if it repeats over a longer time, things get quite obvious to everyone in the scene...
Also, the sunk cost fallacy means that some organizations will continue shoveling money at the bad system they already purchased because of the shiny marketing. If you're prepared to sell "upgrades" and consulting services around your product, it's sometimes possible to make more money from a bad product than one that "just works".
I'm not cynical enough to say that the situations I described are normal. But they are common enough.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Your competitors earned some money and will gain interest on it, if they are smart.
The "market" the quote relates to is the stock market. Very different than selling products to be used.
If you invested in the product itself (instead of marketing), that can gain you something as well in the long term.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It's a very thorough discussion of the topic. A rather long read, but absolutely worth it.
> (I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)
But then nature has found ways to organize: the cells in our bodies don't compete in any obvious way, but they work together. Our right hand doesn't fight our left hand. Etc.
Perhaps Moloch is what you get when Nature reaches a level where evolution stops to work (or at the "edge" of evolution). We can't evolve as a planet because there is only one planet, and evolution would need many iterations sacrificing many individual planets on the way.
I'm still processing the article in my head, but as I understood it: it's important that all cells in your body share the same genome. For some reason, evolution in multicellular organisms can be seen as two-tier - competition between the cells, and competition between collections of cells (organism). The higher-level competition forces the individual cells to behave in fully-cooperative way; those organisms that can't enforce order within get cancer and die prematurely.
The mechanics of it seem sound, and it's a nice model for a lot of things, natural and otherwise, but I'm still confused about how such two-tiered evolution could've arisen in nature wrt. multi-cellular structures.
When a company makes a profit, it essentially means that they're capturing wealth that could have otherwise gone to the customer. The more wealth the customer captures, the more they want to use your product or service. This is why so many startups are unprofitable for so long. They burn money in order to compete with more established players until eventually they dominate the market, and then they turn the knobs to become profitable. All else being equal, profit is at odds with competitiveness.
Of course if you have outside investors (especially institutional investors) they'll eventually require you to start optimizing for profit. But it's not to be competitive, it's because the competition is now over because they've effectively monopolized their space, and now it's time to cash in.
I'm a big proponent of bootstrapping, and this is why. In the early days, you have to be a little bit profitable (you can't burn money for years like a Softbank-backed company would) but once things start working, you can stay in the "a little bit profitable" world which allows you to treat customers and employees well, instead of moving into the "maximize profit" world that most successful companies end up in.
That’s a great quip. Was talking to a friend that works in banking (fund management) who made a similar point; bankers aren’t necessarily evil. It’s just a modern bankers view on the world is mostly in the form of rows in a spreadsheet that need optimizing. Whether those rows represent green energy or weapons, and what the consequences of trading in them are, are not things that a clearly visible to a banker on a busy day. The bankers view is just numbers going up or down.
Dark patterns will yield great results, but you don't want to trick your users into buying something? There are alternatives besides having a website that's thrown together, doesn't pitch your product and requires the potential user to really, really want to try your product to suffer through the website.
It's true even in open source projects imho. If you want users to try and eventually use your software, it's good to make it easy for them.
I feel like much of the marketing problem comes from three places:
- overcompetition (too many useless products competing for mindshare) - inefficiency (if you can't target your marketing well, you just shotgun it out) - debt (pressure for cash makes people do things they otherwise wouldn't)
So we end up with a push-based economy.
The idle thought in my head is: what would a pull-based economy work? And not necessarily a whole economic overhaul, but for instance, what if I personally wanted to do things in a pull-based way, or encourage others do so? What would any of that look like?
Here's what I think a half-overhaul towards pull-based economy would look like. At a minimum, no advertising in push form whatsoever. That means no ads on the web, no ads in newspapers (on-line or print), TV, no product placement, no leaflets, no billboards. No ads of any kind where you'd encounter them by accident. Product discovery would be focused on company sites, on-line catalogs, mail-order catalogs, on-line product/service search engines, trade shows, and other outlets which were labeled up-front as product discovery. The goal here is that an ordinary person should have full control over whether and when they get exposed to advertising, and secondarily, to make it customer-driven. Make it easy for the person with needs to find solutions to these needs, evaluate different options based on trustworthy information[0], and pick one that works best for them.
That's more-less the idea I have on this topic. It's incomplete, probably a bit incoherent, and definitely not optimal for hundreds of reasons. I expect it to be torn apart, and I'll be thankful for criticism - I can't develop it further without feedback :).
As for how to make any of this happen for yourself, today? I'd start with the obvious - aggressive ad-blocking, avoiding exposing yourself to anything that smells of content marketing, getting rid of your TV service (the hardware itself can still work well for playing games on a console). Never doing product discovery on an e-commerce site. Asking trustworthy friends for recommendations of products and services, and giving recommendations if asked, qualifying your level of certainty and disclosing any conflict of interest. Being proactive about searching for things you need on-line. Perhaps subscribing to an industry magazine, but bearing in mind that it's - to quote Paul Graham, "a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine"[1], and otherwise not trusting it further than you can throw it. Inflicting social pressure on people who decide to monetize their friends and family, if you know any (MLMs, influencers). Also, learning to respect your money and not spend it on an impulse - to counter the long-term influence of advertising. Make each purchase a conscious one.
That's more-less what I do. I barely see any overt ads on-line these days. Can't avoid covert ads, can't avoid meatspace ads either, but I can make damn sure that if I feel sudden desire for a particular product or product category, I'll pause and spend some time researching it independently before making a decision. The goal here isn't to stop buying things, but to maximize the utility and happiness you buy per dollar spent.
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[0] - Efficient market requires minimizing information asymmetry. To the extent advertising is spreading disinformation, it's making the market less efficient.
There's a case to be made that people get the marketing they deserve, as evidenced in their voting patterns and buying behavior. It's interesting to contemplate what things would be like if consumer groups, like department stores, had "buyers." YouTube reviewers or industry mags supposedly serve that role right now, but inevitably get corrupted because of where the money comes from.
I hate it when people make this case, or in general anything along the lines of "revealed preferences". This hides a certain divide-and-conquer that's happening. A single individual can't, in general, influence the market with their purchasing behavior. A thousand buyers simultaneously switching vendors would register on someone's radar, but real buyers are uncoordinated. Consider the 3.5mm audio jack and phones. If all the people who were unhappy about Apple having the "courage" to drop it would band together and announce that they'll hold off with upgrading their iPhones or switch to Samsung, Apple would quickly reconsider. As it is, you've got lots of people complaining, but buying anyway, because they know they alone can't affect the market, and they need a decent phone.
This is related to a general observation that you can only "vote with your wallet" among the options available on the market. You don't have a way to vote for feature combination that isn't offered, for a product that doesn't exist.
Whether a bunch of buyers could accept this, decide to coordinate, etc., and what it would look like, is the thing I'm turning over. Like, to get really wild: what if you could join a buyer's group that restricted you? The downside would be a loss of freedom, but the upside would be access to market power. We seem to be OK making this bargain on the sell side with our employment...
There are obviously versions of this that could never work, but it would be very interesting if you could find one that could!
I'd argue it's a simple division of labor. Engineers need to stay focused on solving technical challenges. Also, when it comes to PM - it's more than just writing product stories or prioritizing them. Doing stakeholder interviews is as art. Asking the right questions is crucial.
So while Engineers stay focused on the how, the PM stays focused on the what. And the UX translates the what into an interactive map easily understood by target audience.
We sell a complicated product for professional designers. I am bad at using it and I don't have a great understanding of user workflows. I could learn more about that but then I would have less time to read our huge codebase and figure out how it works.
I worked in QA and I think this is similar. The best QA testers aren’t engineers because they don’t make assumptions. Marketers make assumptions but not about code but about human behavior like you said but I think this relates more to the U/X and marketing relationship vs the engineer to U/X relationship.
Cue in the stereotypical markethead rappresentation: vapid, buzzword filled, socially successful.
We all sucked at programming in the beginning too! Just keep at it and your marketing chops will improve.
They are often dead wrong about this moral high-ground, good brand/marketing can be the difference between success and failure.
I've lived in this difficult world for decades, started out as a programmer, but the majority of my work is marketing and brand management. Iv'e worked with start-ups that 100% refuse all brand/marketing, and others that are completely misguided. But ive also worked with very successful companies that devote the time and money to marketing. After all what's the point of making something if no one uses it.
Car's sell because they have personality, it's not just about what's under the hood.
This is a pretty sweeping generalisation.
You said it here. Some.
Like some engineering endeavors are outrageously ridiculous. No?
You assume it is a matter of ignorance and not them simply not caring. I've come to find many people who work in marketing almost Trumpian in their relationship with information.
"End to end encryption" doesn't show up in a marketing brainstorm that goes unnoticed into branding creatives. Chiefs, Management, Product Teams, marketers, engineers, product managers, everyone knew it.
One of the main problems with project that launch their marketing campaign is their attempt to create an image of something they are not yet to become.
I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience, telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick. That's when your company becomes a brand, and people can recognize with it
This is more about perception and something to aim at. It's extremely difficult to develop a brand if you don't have anything to aim at, because from the moment you have an hook, you can anchor pretty much everything based on that and this allows you to do something that's extremely important in branding: consistency and congruency.
Your brand, communication, product, should all be in line with what they might not be yet, but are aiming at.
>I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience, telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick.
Being transparent when necessary, yes. If you have something that's harmless and innocuous, it brings no value to anyone to flag it.
Telling about progress works with a small minority, like a dev log works mainly for that audience. Stripe, Facebook, Google, have a lot of this in place to try to lure in talent, or more of that than to make people use their product - so in a sense, this is a "marketing trick".
Most people want something that works, either from a tangible point of view like a flash light that turns on, or intangible, like a piece of clothing that makes them feel they belong to something that others will recognize.
Recently finished an MVP as a personal project, and was thinking about how promote it. It's a daunting task.
It's nice to think that l337 design (well... It's functional, hopefully) and a Reddit/HN post will be enough, but that's probably analogous to writing the first test record to your dev database, techwise...
On top of that, confidence is a big thing. What if my core hypothesis is flawed, or it's just a silly product? It's natural to want to innoculate yourself against criticism and rejection... That's a fundamental psychological feature of all nerds afterall.
The trick is to remember that those responses are still better than the alternative of no one using your project or caring enough to provide any feedback. Users providing feedback is a good thing, even if it is negative.
I post a lot about my side project here and on other forums. It would be great if everyone just knew about it and already decided if it was something that they were interested in or not, but I know only a small fraction of relevant users are even aware it exists.
For me, it would be way worse to spend time building something that people might find beneficial but never got a chance to hear about, than sharing it and being criticized on the internet.
Jokes aside, a large component of marketing is in aggregating opinion. The other half is the dark art we famously complain about.
Aggregating opinion at any level is hard work. And it's almost been elevated to a science now, so it has to be respected.
So to perform all that work to derive a conclusion which will most likely (given all that's known about the probability of start ups and success) prove you wrong, seems a perverse thing to do.
Masochistic, in fact.
I think it's easier to perform this work in the third person... It turns the dynamic on its head (like the schadenfreuder one might feel when working on a software project in the capicity of a QA tester). You're performing a clinical service.
But it takes some special effort to willingly put yourself through it...
I dunno.
I suppose I'll learn more if I just do it...
Stay humble, get it out there, focus on learning, and good luck!
99% people dropped before they even saw the app.
I could have built the best app in the world, and no one would have ever known.
I experimented with two ad campaigns, on Facebook and on Reddit, both the cheapest options. Had some weird results from the FB one: most of the "reached" users were concentrated in Eastern Europe, even though my locations were set to the US, Canada and Europe. All in all, it didn't yield many clicks but for ~£10 I wasn't expecting much.
Reddit's ads are more expensive, and I was dissapointed to find that you can't target just any subreddit. They have a list of "ad-approved" ones that you can pick from. Campaign is still running but it already looks like it's reached more people. Not sure if it's resulting in more clicks though.
[0] Shameless plug: https://makely.me
I haven't signed up myself, but how are you planning on solving the chicken/egg marketplace problem?
> how are you planning on solving the chicken/egg marketplace problem
The plan at the moment is to advertise whilst it's still in deveopment and get a healthy user base of mostly creators. It will take time; I don't expect it to blow up overnight.
I have worries when it comes to attracting enough "clients" because that's significantly harder to advertise to. To start off with, the demographic we'll be targeting will be general gaming and board game enthusiasts, as well as some of the "creative" communities that exist on the web.
I have considered rebranding, but I am yet to think of something better. Makely has slowly grown on me. I'll be happy to listen to suggestions!
Some people seem to equate marketing with the promotion of existing products. Some others see marketing as helping to determine the products / services the company should build.
Are there better terms for these different functions in an organization?
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For what it's worth, one of the best articles in the list, for me, was patio11's:
Business of SaaS - https://stripe.com/au/atlas/guides/business-of-saas
I will say that the list of resources seems to be oriented towards tactics more than thinking about what your strategy around the product is.
Am I the only one that thinks it’s annoying that people feel compelled to announce their enthusiasm? I’ve always thought reddit comments along the lines of “have you an upvote” were annoying noise, but this seems a bit more egregious. Issues are supposed to be for reporting issues, it’s on the name! Not only did someone have to spend time to read this, and close it, but it crowds out actual issues.
Here's the link to the original source : https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-Engineers