Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Product Marketing for Engineers

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 89 posts

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#11

Post by harryf »

I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like...

- “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

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#12

Post by [deleted] »

harryf wrote: post #11

I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like... - “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…

[deleted]

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#13

Post by luckylion »

harryf wrote: post #11

I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like... - “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…

I'm not sure it's narrow mindedness, I feel like it's mostly principles and not seeing that marketing isn't only spam, lies and shit.

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 , 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.

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#14

Post by shirak_untel »

Great resource!

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

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#16

Post by philshem »

dang wrote: post #7
jeremyw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderators: please update this post's URL to Lisa Dziuba's copy; most up to date, and of course, proper credit!

Ok, changed from https://github.com/michael-andreuzza/Marketing-for-Engineers .

I would petition to add “Software” in front of “Engineers” in the title, and perhaps adding “Product” in front of “Marketing”. I’m supporting a mechanical engineer get his remote services business going, and as far as I can tell this resource is _not_ of interest.

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#17

Post by enriquto »

This is nice and fine, but I feel that the world needs more engineering for marketeers. Some of the marketing stuff that they pull out is so outrageulsy ridiculous (cf. zoom's infamous "end to end encryption") that we are afraid to talk about their products in polite company.

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#18

Post by TeMPOraL »

luckylion wrote: post #13
harryf wrote: post #11

I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like... - “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…

I'm not sure it's narrow mindedness, I feel like it's mostly principles and not seeing that marketing isn't only spam, lies and shit. 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 t…

I think your view on this will depend on what do you believe the distribution of good vs. evil in marketing looks like. Is it like this?

  ^  DECENCY                              PROFIT
  |  --->                                                   /----              
   EVIL                                        GOOD
Or like this?

  ^ DECENCY                               PROFIT
  | ->      |\                             | \                      
   EVIL                                        GOOD
I personally believe it's the latter. I added arrows indicating opposing incentives at personal level, and I believe the profit motive is much stronger than personal morals, for two main reasons.

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".

Re: Product Marketing for Engineers

#20

Post by TeMPOraL »

enriquto wrote: post #17

This is nice and fine, but I feel that the world needs more engineering for marketeers. Some of the marketing stuff that they pull out is so outrageulsy ridiculous (cf. zoom's infamous "end to end encryption") that we are afraid to talk about their products in polite company.

I'm not sure if it would help. Zoom's "end to end encryption" wasn't a honest mistake of some cryptographically-clueless marketer; it was deliberate bullshitting at best, intentional lie at worst.
Post reply on HN