The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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