Developers Should Understand Business & Marketing

In my last post, I wrote about how marketers need to understand technology and web and software/hardware development.

But do developers also need to speak the language of business and marketers?
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Developers need to understand marketing, to understand that the needs of the users who will be using their product, understand their personalities, and understand the needs of those who are actually buying the product. Particularly in a business-to-business environment, the person signing the check is usually not the person using the software or hardware.

Developers, guided by their product managers, need to get what the stakeholders want and ensure that the product actually speaks to their needs. The point isn’t just for the end-user to have a cool new toy. In the end, Jerry McGuire was correct: show me the money. Providing long-term value requires meeting financial goals. This requires a strong sales and marketing team, and cooperation between the teams.

This requires creating a great product, in the right space, and persuasively communicating the benefits of the product to the correct audiences. This can be achieved much better when both sides can understand the same language.

Gil Zilberfield speaks about this from the developer side. Developers need to speak both business and developer-ish. “It’s much easier to build the bridge when everyone talking the same language,” says Gil.

At the end of the day, you need to tell the story. When working in a commercial software environment, you have to get the sign off from those who have the purchasing authority. These are usually the business managers (who may not have a technical background): those who are purchasing the software or hardware because it fits a business need. If they don’t understand your product, or if it doesn’t fit their business need, they won’t buy it no matter how cool it might be to the technical user.

A commercial project isn’t the same as an open source project. For an open source project, you may only need to please the end users. But, for a commercial product, you’re not going to sell more than a handful if you can’t show that your product has a positive ROI: it helps save money – whether through saved time, better quality, reduced support costs, or other operational efficiencies. In order to be a market leader, you must be useful for all involved.

This is the same values for both business and developers. Businesses want a good product that is well-developed because it saves them money. Developers want a good product because it showcases their craftsmanship and ability to turn complex problems into a useful (and cool) solution. Either way: the end goal is providing value to the stakeholders (not only the end-user).

Being useful also means listening to your customers and your community. Some developers have claimed that marketing ruins the software community. However, that is a market failure – poor business management – not the job of marketing. According to Surfing the Long Summer, a book about how businesses can lead their market, one of the core criteria for success is a focus on the long-term vision. This is not achieved by focusing on short-term balance sheets or providing shareholder value. Short-term balance sheets are required only in order to have the resources to provide long-term value. If marketers of developer software upset their core community, that wasn’t the job of marketing but rather the failure of specific individuals who didn’t do their job. On the other hand, every developer evangelist or MVP program in the end is really there in order to sell more products or raise awareness. It, like everything else in a company, can only exist as long as it serves a defined business objective.

As another colleague wrote in his blog post Meet Marketing: The Dark Side of Software Development (even if I take issue with the title), “marketing is a necessary step towards releasing a great product. It’s imperative that the marketing department understands the product and the target audience for it. It is especially true if you’re building something other than a twitter client – a software development tool perhaps.” Of course, whether or not you are making development tools, the developers need to understand the users involved in the process from purchasing decisions to product usage. They need marketing to help with product usability and ensuring that it meets the functions that can give real business value. The software or hardware needs to meet the needs of those buying and using it.

Developers need marketing in order to help decide what the product is supposed to do and make sure that existing and potential customers’ needs are being met. Sitting closest to the customers, it’s the role of marketing and sales to help define the business requirements that the developers will then code. Only when both sides can effectively communicate, can they truly develop and sell a truly winning product.

In the end, success is achieved when teams can come together and silos can be broken in order to achieve mutual and integrated success. If one department isn’t successful, than the company can’t succeed.

Are Marketers Technically Illiterate? Marketers Need to Get Technology and Development

Being called a computer geek before I ever worked professionally, I am sometimes shocked by the clashes between web and software and hardware developers, and marketing. In my mind, they both need to work together in order for the company to achieve its goals. I assumed developers understood the need for a clear message, and, like me, I thought marketers loved technology and computing.

Bored at WorkIn this first post, I will discuss why marketers need to be technically literate and understand developer and tech speak. In my next post, I will discuss why developers need to understand the language of business.

Marketers need to speak the language of technology – particularly their own, like web technologies, and their target products’, to craft the right messages, and position their products in the proper market niche.

Marketers need to get digital platforms: today’s core communication channels. In the old days of print, this may have been unnecessary for traditional marketers, with graphic designed easily outsourced. With the requirements of e-commerce affecting nearly all businesses, even service and physical stores, digital platforms have become essential touchpoints that need frequent adaptation – even minor – which require, at a minimum, basic web development and simple graphic design skills.

While the basic rules of strategy hasn’t changed, technology has always been a core component in formulating market strategy, and strategists need to develop a plan that makes sense when implemented in the real world. If it’s based on a misunderstanding of how the web works, a fancy obsession with the latest new toy, or a Luddite aversion to technology, that strategy will fail.

Technological literacy is becoming a necessary requirement for marketers, whether they are selling software or sofas. Whether purchasing online or just researching, platforms such as a website, blogs, mobile applications, and email, purchasing decisions take place over technical channels. The sales funnel happens online. Marketers need to understand this in order to develop and carry out correct strategy.

At a minimum, this means that marketers need to have the technical literacy and competency to know web development – at least the capability to handle basic tasks like content updating in a CMS, understanding the basics of SEO, which includes issues like clean code, web server load time, and page redirects and social media. They also need to know basic website management, even if the heavy lifting is handled by your web developer. With marketers that have a print background, the focus was on the final look of the deliverable to the viewer. With digital platforms, effectiveness isn’t just how it looks to the end-user but also the technical infrastructure on which it’s based on. If your website looks pretty, but can’t be indexed by the search engines, how useful is it?

This is true regardless of your product.

When selling hardware or software, technical literacy is even more important.

The role of the marketing strategist is to develop the market position. When selling technical products, the marketers need to have an understanding of the product, the position it belongs in, and the problem it is intended to solve. It’s the marketers that create the communication and messaging. They can’t derive messages or build a brand for something that they don’t understand. If the target audience is a foreign species, how can they craft an effective message and communicate authentically with them?

A thorough technical understanding of the product can also help find more channels to help promote your product. A few weeks ago, my company launched its first product for Linux. I’ve used the Ubuntu Linux distribution for several years. I’m not a Linux guru or a top sysadmin, but I can make my way around the command line when needed. In fact, I’m writing this post in Linux. This knowledge of Linux assisted in helping to craft a message that will be perceived as authentic to the Linux audience – coming from a Linux user itself – and identifying and locating more media outlets and channels to promote the product, which has already lead to increased product awareness.

Of course, marketing isn’t responsible for developing the product and development is not responsible for marketing the product.

Hence, the two sides need to work together and bridge the gaps.

In the next post, I will write about how software and hardware developers also need to understand marketing.