Product Marketing for Engineers

I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when it comes to marketing. Things like...<p>- “Marketing is evil!” ... perhaps but it’s also a necessary evil if you want anyone using your product<p>- “Build it and they will come” ... except they won’t unless you tell people<p>- “I hate spam&#x2F;push messages&#x2F;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<p>- “We have all these features &#x2F; options so let’s so let’s just show them all to the user and let them figure it out” ... paradox of choice etc<p>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

Marketing can be a real struggle for engineers, they are often so focused on &quot;proving&quot; what works, they feel marketing or promotion somehow pollutes the purity of their invention. They are also REALLY bad at the aesthetics of design.<p>They are often dead wrong about this moral high-ground, good brand&#x2F;marketing can be the difference between success and failure.<p>I&#x27;ve lived in this difficult world for decades, started out as a programmer, but the majority of my work is marketing and brand management. Iv&#x27;e worked with start-ups that 100% refuse all brand&#x2F;marketing, and others that are completely misguided. But ive also worked with very successful companies that devote the time and money to marketing. After all what&#x27;s the point of making something if no one uses it.<p>Car&#x27;s sell because they have personality, it&#x27;s not just about what&#x27;s under the hood.

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&#x27;s infamous &quot;end to end encryption&quot;) that we are afraid to talk about their products in polite company.

I feel like I must not be good at marketing because I find the emojis to be a massive turn-off &#x2F; distraction from the content

Great resource!<p>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.<p>I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience, telling them about the progress you&#x27;ve made and the difficulties your company face and overcome, that&#x27;s worth more than any marketing trick. That&#x27;s when your company becomes a brand, and people can recognize with it

Been looking for a guide like this.<p>Recently finished an MVP as a personal project, and was thinking about how promote it. It&#x27;s a daunting task.<p>It&#x27;s nice to think that l337 design (well... It&#x27;s functional, hopefully) and a Reddit&#x2F;HN post will be enough, but that&#x27;s probably analogous to writing the first test record to your dev database, techwise...<p>On top of that, confidence is a big thing. What if my core hypothesis is flawed, or it&#x27;s just a silly product? It&#x27;s natural to want to innoculate yourself against criticism and rejection... That&#x27;s a fundamental psychological feature of all nerds afterall.

I saw a sales funnel for an app I built for a customer once.<p>99% people dropped before they even saw the app.<p>I could have built the best app in the world, and no one would have ever known.

Looks useful as I&#x27;m just getting into that sort of stuff for my business [0]<p>I experimented with two ad campaigns, on Facebook and on Reddit, both the cheapest options. Had some weird results from the FB one: most of the &quot;reached&quot; users were concentrated in Eastern Europe, even though my locations were set to the US, Canada and Europe. All in all, it didn&#x27;t yield many clicks but for ~£10 I wasn&#x27;t expecting much.<p>Reddit&#x27;s ads are more expensive, and I was dissapointed to find that you can&#x27;t target just any subreddit. They have a list of &quot;ad-approved&quot; ones that you can pick from. Campaign is still running but it already looks like it&#x27;s reached more people. Not sure if it&#x27;s resulting in more clicks though.<p>[0] Shameless plug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;makely.me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;makely.me</a>

I always enjoy <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketingexamples.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketingexamples.com&#x2F;</a> it’s a good one for lot’s of different ideas and how others did it.

Are there two different definitions of the marketing function in everyday use?<p>Some people seem to equate marketing with the promotion of existing products. Some others see marketing as helping to determine the products &#x2F; services the company should build.<p>Are there better terms for these different functions in an organization?

This is a great compendium. What might be helpful is a bit of a flow chart or an actual step-wise guide that shows you what to consider when and why and how. I&#x27;m reading Seth Godin&#x27;s &quot;This is Marketing&quot; book right now.

Product Marketing for Engineers, or developers&#x2F;programmers? Because I have a feeling that actual engineers (process engineers, systems engineers, mechanical engineers, etc.) aren&#x27;t going to be able to utilise this list.

That&#x27;s actually extremely helpful. Thank you!

Really helpful. Thanks!!

Original source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LisaDziuba&#x2F;Marketing-for-Engineers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LisaDziuba&#x2F;Marketing-for-Engineers</a><p>---<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, one of the best articles in the list, for me, was patio11&#x27;s:<p>Business of SaaS - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;au&#x2F;atlas&#x2F;guides&#x2F;business-of-saas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;au&#x2F;atlas&#x2F;guides&#x2F;business-of-saas</a>

Really? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LisaDziuba&#x2F;Marketing-for-Engineers&#x2F;issues&#x2F;24" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LisaDziuba&#x2F;Marketing-for-Engineers&#x2F;issues...</a><p>Am I the only one that thinks it’s annoying that people feel compelled to announce their enthusiasm? I’ve always thought reddit comments along the lines of “have you an upvote” were annoying noise, but this seems a bit more egregious. Issues are supposed to be for reporting issues, it’s on the name! Not only did someone have to spend time to read this, and close it, but it crowds out <i>actual</i> issues.

Why link to your fork, which is only behind the upstream?