The curse of the full stack marketer

<i>That’s the curse of the full stack marketer. Over time, if we’re successful, we put ourselves out of a job.</i><p>Unless you are the co-founder of the startup.<p>Also, if you are the full stack marketer of a &lt;10 people startup (where almost everyone is a engineer); you should naturally put yourself in the place of this startup VP Marketing.<p>Sure, years of experience count if you want to be hired as a VP Marketing at any other company. But a very important upside of being an early employee is the potential to grow with the company faster than you would at a traditional one (the same way the startup itself hopes to grow much faster than the incumbents).<p>If people are coming from outside to a position higher than you, then is one of two options: (i) you are not as good as a full stack marketer as you should be or (ii) you chose poorly the founders for whom you would work for.<p>So I would say that that&#x27;s the bless of being a full stack marketer. If you choose your startup well, you would be a VP Marketing years before someone on the traditional path.

This sounds like a temporary issue in your career, or, put another way, a circumstance of that particular job. In another year or two (or in another opp that values slightly different things) the full stack marketer will be incredibly valuable again.<p>Note the value may be for new reasons: Simply understanding all angles of a business is incredibly valuable, and often lacking. It&#x27;s arguably the one skill one needs more than anything to become a member of senior leadership at most well-functioning companies.

I could imagine this is a problem as a company grows. I&#x27;ve run a ton of Facebook ads every day for three years, so I know the ins and outs of how to do a performance-based ad campaign. Compare me to someone who is good or dabbled in SEO, display, Facebook ads, Adwords, etc. and I&#x27;m probably the best choice to run your Facebook ad campaigns. So you could be replaced by a specialist. I think that&#x27;s why you should look at it less as a curse and more as the way to know what path you want to take (VP of Marketing, go to another startup, grow into a specialty at your current company, or take a more managerial role in marketing at your current company).

It sounds like poor decision making to me. You should become really good at a particular area then migrate into full stack. I encounter this in programming all the time. People claim to be &quot;full stack developers&quot; but when you give them anything above a beginner level problem on something specific they can&#x27;t do it. If you want to be able to work on the &quot;full stack&quot; in any field you have to earn it and really master all the pieces one by one.

I don&#x27;t see a good reason for appropriating the phrase &#x27;full stack&#x27; for marketing.