Marketing & Engineering — Part 1: A Love Letter
OK, so this is a thing: hostility between marketing and engineering. I learned about it when I got my first marketing job in an engineering organization and was told by my beloved engineer colleagues, rather unambiguously, multiple times, in these exact words: “I hate marketing”.
The feeling is, not surprisingly, mutual: in predominantly engineering companies, marketers often feel underappreciated, isolated, even superfluous. However, some 16 months into managing content in a SaaS company, I find myself feeling quite the opposite: I actually really like working with engineers. Here is why.
They abhor distasteful, aggressive marketing
Engineers are ultra-sophisticated consumers. All that stuff the rest of us hate: click & bait titles that lure you into bad articles, annoying pop-up ads, privacy invasions…they hate it more, and (perhaps more importantly) they hate it first. To that effect, dear marketers, take note: when engineers criticize our techniques, don’t get upset — get educated. Take their commentary (even when it comes in form of mockery) as a sign of things to come with audiences in general, and adapt. Offer knowledge, intelligent & helpful content, sincerity and unforced humor (how on Earth did we marketers get so far away from this anyway?), and success will follow.
They are intelligent
In a previous life I studied engineering enough to know that not all engineers are genius-gods; as my colleague Dave put it, the discipline is often more plumbing than magic. Same Dave rightfully got down on my case for making such a dubious claim (“what is intelligence, anyway?”). Nevertheless, I’d like to observe the following traits that I consider evidence, even if you don’t appreciate great coding.
Engineers are organized. If I get files for a blog post from an engineer, they always come in a consistent format, with a logical naming convention. If this seems basic to you, let me tell you: attorneys don’t do it. HR people don’t do it. Most marketers don’t do it. It is, in fact, a rare professional field where an adoption and practice of good project management principles is a universal phenomenon as much as it is in successful engineering organizations.
They think fast. Seriously. I therefore generally feel inspired to express myself articulately and present things in a succinct, organized way. Whether it’s because I work in a startup where everyone tends to be fairly motivated and engaged, I do not know, but I sure am enjoying it.
They are intellectually curious. Dave comments: “this is famously, infamously, nowhere near universally true”, so let me qualify it a bit by saying that engineers I work with are more intellectually curious than any other profession I’ve worked with. My company’s Slack channels include #Food, #Book-club, #Basketball, and many more. There is also #Watercooler, which kind of replaced other social media in my life, largely because it contains such a great variety of fun stuffs. Which brings me to:
They are funny
Corporate America can be a glum place. Lots of bad jokes everywhere, to which, being a nice person that I am, I feel obliged to at least smile at. This is exhausting. In fact, at this point of my life, I’d rather be in a humorless environment than in one with forced humor. But I most enjoy being in an environment with a good dose of excellent humor.
Recently, in our #blog channel, after I proposed we replace clichés in announcing new features with something more original:
collin [11:21 AM] “some developer just delivered this”
peter [11:26 AM] 50% off if you use this new feature/integration!
ray [11:27 AM] “and now for something completely different”
nik [11:27 AM] BREAKING NEWS! (bold, italic, underline)
collin [11:27 AM] “with this one weird trick…
jared [11:30 AM] 12 things only our customers will understand
collin [11:30 AM] 10 reasons to never use counters
ray [11:31 AM] #2 will surprise you
peter [11:32 AM] Counters hate this Composite Measurement trick!
This kind of stuff makes my day. I don’t really know how to explain it any better, so let’s move on.
They want to help (but you have to ask)
Engineers can be the most supportive colleagues. Two principles at work here:
1) As Danielle Morrill said, treat them like people and present yourself as a human, rather than some sort of a demand generation engine. You could, for example, confess that you are struggling with content resonating with your engineer audience, or that you don’t fully understand the tool that you are advertising (shockingly common in technical marketing). If you do human, vulnerable things like this, you will get so much thoughtful help that you may sometimes tear up a little bit, like I did when a director of engineering helped me organize a product lunch’n learn for marketing, or when one of our developers crafted a call to action with the photo of his kitty on the “sign up now” button.
2) Give them the background. When I took on content marketing at my company, and realized the key to success would be having engineers write for the blog, I did not just present the CTO with my hunch, or “others are doing it and so are we”. I showed evidence of poor traction of current content, and came up with a solid plan that minimized taking engineering resources from the product. That worked. Better even, give them a problem to solve, even if it’s a marketing problem.
They are, for the most part, really good writers
This comes with one thing I dislike about working with engineers: some of the, ahem, smarter ones, genuinely believe that they are the best at everything: marketing, writing, editing, social media…but that’s a topic for another article. What I want to say is: most of them are good to awesome writers.
Of course, engineering content lends itself to engineering way of thinking: instructional, organized, well-structured. And, most people struggle with their first pieces. Nevertheless, the quality of content by engineers is, for the most part, quite high. There are stars, too: our CTO’s writing puts most biz and marketing people to shame, the developer evangelist is a downright poet, and — just check any engineering blog — content is quite impressive for people whose profession has little to do with writing.
They are… themselves
Because developers kind of rule the world right now, they get a bit more poetic license than the rest of us (say, with free-for-all cursing and opinionating on Twitter), but I’ll argue that’s a good thing. Who isn’t tired of being one person at work and another at home? Let’s be thankful to anyone bringing this kind of duplicity down.
In a similar vein: when I get to know an engineer at work, I get a sense that I’ve gotten to know them as a person, and at least as far as my company goes, most people are really nice and collegial. As a marketer and an editor, I have of course run into…situations, but I take it all in stride and, thankfully, so do they. What else can one ask for?
Small Print and Part II
As I wrote all this, a new article was forming fast in my head — a listicle, in fact: “X Reasons why I dislike working with engineers” (oh, yes, there are challenges)…but the good stuff is still dominant, and all of the above a genuine reflection of my feelings. Another disclaimer: it is entirely possible that this is a result of my experience working with fine engineers at Librato. However, my sense is that you’ll have a similar experience at most developer-centric startups.
I got some pretty epic feedback on this article from Dave Josephsen: so epic that I considered scratching all this. We thought about co-authoring a back-and-forth, doing a series of interviews, filming a video, and what not. However, work does keep us pretty busy, and we did not want to turn this into a saga, so stay tuned for Part II and/or Dave’s comments below.
