Ask HN: Engineers turned into marketing people, how and why? - mezod
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nealrs
Oh wow. I feel like I just asked the reverse of this question 3 min after you
posted this.

I was a mechE at Caterpillar for 4 years before I decided that my position was
a local max in the organization. So I studied, took the GMAT, and applied to
b-school. Ended up at NYU and did lots of internships in branding / publishing
/ marketing and eventually found a route into tech marketing via account
management at an ad-tech company that needed someone with solid excel skills &
was willing to get on the phone.

Good marketers are eager to talk to people and figure out what their product
can/should be doing for others. Then they feed that back to Product. I think
Product/Marketing are two sides of the same product development coin.

One way to position yourself as a marketing candidate is as an excellent SME
on tech -- you get tech better than your colleagues, so you become invaluable
to the team.

~~~
mezod
hehe, nice!

I'm actually an engineer who likes to create products but who really sucks at
marketing. I never looked at marketeers over the shoulder but now that I am
trying to market my own products I realize what a hard and important work is.

I think I did a good job up to the point of finding a real need that people
are willing to pay for a solution, but one thing is to get the early traction
and a whole other is to actually be able to live from it... the struggle is
real :P

