No. Marketing and sales should be siloed away from devs. This is why you need a product person to intermediate.
Marketing and sales has very different incentives from developers. Marketers are often trigger happy with features because they "sell" despite the fact that these feature may have a short shelf life and may take resources away from developing of more essential product features. Developers are similarly allergic to additional development because it's (1) work (2) often results in technical debt.
You need to have an intermediary to think about what features actually matter and how they fit into a broader development roadmap otherwise you risk building a product with lots of bells and whistles no one really cares about that's a beast to maintain.
I think this is a bad take depending on the context, especially for small companies. First you’re painting developers with a rather broad brush. I know plenty of developers who like to think about how features impact end users and like to interact with people in general to figure out how to build the right features that create that impact. Good developers are perfectly capable of interacting with broader teams to create something that really benefits users.
Similarly not all marketers are “trigger happy with features” a lot of marketers understand how feature work impacts developers and actually take time to figure out the most important features to build and market and don’t have short shelf life.
In my experience you’ve basically just described people bad at their jobs all around.
Following your advice would just be adding potentially unnecessary headcount and creating an unnecessary communication gap between two critical teams, again with a focus on small business or startups. I do think larger companies could do well with less compartmentalization as well though.
I catch your point but honestly, developers are in a better place to make those kinds of decisions. It just takes some mindset training.
When a potential customer has a problem, they go through several hoops before they have any hope of finding a solution. First, they have to recognize and identify a problem. Second, they have to motivate themselves to solve that particular problem over all others.
Once a potential customer has made those leaps, they are potentially your potential customer. That’s when the language leap comes into play. My favourite example is “I built a scraper but it turns out the market wants an automated tool to crawl their entire website and return some data.” Catch what happened there?? I built a scraper but the paying market doesn’t know what a scraper is.
If your language matches up with a potential customer’s language, there is a chance they will see you, pay attention and decide that you could solve their problem. That’s around the time when marketing campaigns will make you question Darwin but try to act surprised…:)
Once you catch that stuff, it’s easier to push back on shitty bloatware marketing feature requests. What’s the real problem here? Does that new feature solve a problem or does it just increase the chances that a potential customer will find you??
If it increases the chance a customer will find you, it might be a good feature. In my experience, it usually means you should do some tech support calls so you can figure out what words your customers use…
Off topic, but there is something intensely irritating about replies that start with “No.” It’s fine to disagree and argue whatever point you want, but when you open with “No.” it seems like you’re saying “You are objectively wrong; I will now enlighten you with the correct viewpoint.”
I'd say that it's central to the topic as it illustrates the problem perfectly.
Marketing is a dialogue between the producer and the user/prospective user. If the first response to someone trying to be helpful is "No." then that dialogue has been essentially shut down immediately and neither side is going to learn anything.
No one who wants to understand the other side's needs is going to respond that way. So they're showing that they have no interest in marketing what they're working on.
All I can think about while reading your comment is "I'm a people person, dammit!" from Office Space. It was not a playbook on how to run an actual software company.
All employee incentives should be aligned around selling more product and lowering cost of delivering said product. The closer that marketing and software work together the more they can empathize with each groups challenges.
Using your example, what makes a product feature essential if it does not in fact sell?
Marketing and sales has very different incentives from developers. Marketers are often trigger happy with features because they "sell" despite the fact that these feature may have a short shelf life and may take resources away from developing of more essential product features. Developers are similarly allergic to additional development because it's (1) work (2) often results in technical debt.
You need to have an intermediary to think about what features actually matter and how they fit into a broader development roadmap otherwise you risk building a product with lots of bells and whistles no one really cares about that's a beast to maintain.