And the Marketer shall dwell with the Engineer

By Limor Shiponi

I’m not going to surprise you with the notion marketers and engineers don’t live happily ever after in many tech organizations. Here are some highlights I’ve heard through the past years:

Maybe they are geniuses, but they have zero communication skills.

I have more important things to do than send info to those clowns.

They’ll sit-up all night, writing in forums and petty nerds’ blogs but not one word to marketing.

Who are you and how do you connect to my space?!

They think they are more important just because they touch the product.

Without us, you wouldn’t have a job.

If they relate, it takes them weeks. You can’t manage communications like that.

What’s the hurry? Your work isn’t THAT cardinal anyway.

Don’t marry them!

There is a way to work towards better cooperation but right now I’m suggesting a practical solution: plug marketing into the product’s PRD/Backlog or more precisely – to the platform it’s managed on – whether a document or a digital tool.

The Product Requirements Document contains a lot of information marketers can use as raw material for content – strategy, tactics and operation. The backlog contains users’ stories, you can get a glimpse into what customers are asking for – in their language or close to it. You get to understand customers’ problems and how your company addresses them. This material makes for content that helps positioning, creates familiarity, and doesn’t need cliché fillers like “cutting edge” “state of the art” and the rest of the fluff.

Most important: you get to see the ongoing core story of your company in the making, in the now, as it lives, and that will radically influence your content and it’s performance – to the better.

Engineers do write – they just don’t write for you. Go see what they write instead of wasting your time and energy on trying to tame them. One authorization as a viewer and you’re in.