Your marketing org should have its own dev resources
Avoid dependence. Move fast. And stay nimble.
I'm not saying you should fire you CTO.
What I am saying though, is…
Your marketing org should have its own dev resources
Too many startup teams start off small and nimble, and adopt a mindset where everyone wears every type of hat. You need people to jump in and fix problems when they can. Move fast, and stay nimble.
Fast forward a little bit, and you find yourself in the following situation:
The website runs on a fancy modern tech stack, that engineers like but marketers hate.
When marketing wants to change a picture, or — God forbid — create a landing page… they need to go begging with the product team to help make it happen.
Marketing decides they want a different tech stack, but they find out that the CTO wants to have final authority on whether to migrate or not.
End result: marketing can't execute on their marketing targets, because they need dev resources from the product team… who want to do other things, like… emm… build the product!
Sounds familiar?
Unfortunately, we've probably all been here.
So when your first marketing hire needs to put a website together, of course the CTO helps make that happen.
When you set up your first analytics implementation, of course the product team helps out with the javascript snippets.
But then you need to switch!
This pattern is really bad.
You're breeding dependence.
And dependence will slow you down — and going slow will kill your startup.
Here's the solution:
The product team is responsible for building the product.
The marketing team is responsible for marketing it.
Each of those teams needs to have the resources to execute their own mission.
Each of those teams needs to have authority to make their own decisions.
Sounds obvious.
But that also means, that marketing needs to have its own dev resources, even if you already have someone on the team who can write code and fix that problem.
If they're in the product team, it's not their job.
Product team builds the product.
Marketing team does the marketing.
Some solutions you might consider:
Hire in-house
If you're big enough, bring in a technical hire onto the marketing team — great.Agency or freelancer
If you can't afford the continuous cost, allow marketing to hire an agency or a freelancer to maintain the website.Break up
Never run your marketing website on the same tech stack as your product or application. Break up those domains. In practice that means: company.com is the marketing website, and the product lives on app.company.com or something like that. Easy.Webflow
Run your marketing website on a low-code environment that provides a WYSIWYG editor. Webflow might do the trick, or maybe something like Framer. Even then, make sure you have someone available to help with more technical edits — and that 'someone' better not be on the product team!Learn
Almost every marketer would benefit from learning just a bit more technical skills. The basics of HTML, CSS, etc are not that hard to pick up.Growth teams
In some domains marketing and engineering might overlap. Onboarding or referral schemes, for example. For these domains, it's a good idea to integrate marketing and product together into integrated product teams. Those teams only build features to support growth objectives.
But the most important thing is a matter of mindset at the financial level:
Allow marketing to have their own dev resources so that they can control their destiny
Until next time,
— Pieter
