
Product Marketing for Engineers - rofws
https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-Engineers
======
harryf
I’ve often found engineers really struggle to jump over their own shadows when
it comes to marketing. Things like...

\- “Marketing is evil!” ... perhaps but it’s also a necessary evil if you want
anyone using your product

\- “Build it and they will come” ... except they won’t unless you tell people

\- “I hate spam/push messages/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

\- “We have all these features / options so let’s so let’s just show them all
to the user and let them figure it out” ... paradox of choice etc

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

~~~
luckylion
I'm not sure it's narrow mindedness, I feel like it's mostly principles and
not seeing that marketing isn't _only_ spam, lies and shit.

I think most engineers associate marketing with sleazy SEO/affiliate/self-
promotion people who offer little to no added value to the web, society or
humanity, who will lie, cheat and steal to make a buck. Most engineers don't
want to be like those people in any way, and that's a good thing, because we'd
all be better off if those people were gone.

But not all of marketing is "I have a shitty product, it has no encryption,
but I will just say that it has super mega NSA encryption because stupid
consumers will not know the difference". A lot of marketing is just getting
the information out there.

I think it's similar to SEO in that sense. There's the shit that's
manipulating Google (and Google is willfully playing along) by just spinning
the same text thousands of times and stuffing keywords into it. Everybody
would be better off if that disappeared. But there's also the basic common
sense SEO. Make sure your HTML works, well, make sure you have your headlines
in <h1>, <h2> etc, make sure the important pages you want found can actually
be reached with links on your site, make sure your site loads fast etc.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I think your view on this will depend on what do you believe the distribution
of good vs. evil in marketing looks like. Is it like this?

    
    
      ^  DECENCY                              PROFIT
      |  --->                                   <---
      |  --->                /----              <---
      |                  /---     \----
      |             /----              \----
      |         /---                        \----
      |     /---                                 \--
      +------------------------------------------------>
       EVIL                                        GOOD
    

Or like this?

    
    
      ^ DECENCY                               PROFIT
      | ->      |\                       <----------
      | ->      | \                      <----------
      |         |  \-
      |        /     \--
      |       /         \-----------
      |     /-                      \------------------
      +------------------------------------------------>
       EVIL                                        GOOD
       

I personally believe it's the latter. I added arrows indicating opposing
incentives at personal level, and I believe the profit motive is much stronger
than personal morals, for two main reasons.

One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for
profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does
something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted.

Two, professional specialization. I sometimes quip, "the only thing necessary
for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough
levels of indirection". I mean it. There's plenty of entrepreneurs who
wouldn't feel comfortable going to someone personally and lying about their
product, or spying on them and selling what they learned to a scammer. But if
such entrepreneur hires a marketing manager, who then outsources all marketing
to an external agency, which buys its tools off-the-shelf, you may suddenly
end up with lies in ads and 50 megabytes of trackers on your GDPR-violating
website, and at no point each individual's conscience crosses the "this is
EVIL" threshold; everyone can point at each other and say, "I'm just doing
what I'm paid to", or "I didn't know my subordinates/subcontractors would do
that".

~~~
allendoerfer
> One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for
> profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor
> does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted.

I have recently learned here on HN, that this is called a Red Queen's race.
Since like me everyone on HN loves expressive language I am spreading the
word.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race)

~~~
Gravityloss
Depends. If you're on the market for a time period, customer A who bought your
shady competitor's product will see all its warts quite soon. Meanwhile, your
own customer B will be happy with your honest product.

The fence sitters on the marketplace might ask both A and B of their
experiences and opinions. They will then calibrate that against A and B
marketing. Maybe one or two customers might be random, but if it repeats over
a longer time, things get quite obvious to everyone in the scene...

~~~
allendoerfer
Which I would counter with another short phrase:

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Your
competitors earned some money and will gain interest on it, if they are smart.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And because they saved the money that you spent on building a good product,
they now have more money to spend on marketing than you.

------
wyck
Marketing can be a real struggle for engineers, they are often so focused on
"proving" what works, they feel marketing or promotion somehow pollutes the
purity of their invention. They are also REALLY bad at the aesthetics of
design.

They are often dead wrong about this moral high-ground, good brand/marketing
can be the difference between success and failure.

I'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'e worked
with start-ups that 100% refuse all brand/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's the point of making
something if no one uses it.

Car's sell because they have personality, it's not just about what's under the
hood.

~~~
phab
> Marketing can be a real struggle for engineers ... They are also REALLY bad
> at the aesthetics of design.

This is a pretty sweeping generalisation.

~~~
wyck
Yes it is, and with 20 years in the game it's generally true, there are always
exceptions of course.

------
enriquto
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's infamous "end to end encryption") that we are afraid to
talk about their products in polite company.

~~~
MattGaiser
> they pull out is so outrageulsy ridiculous (cf. zoom's infamous "end to end
> encryption")

You assume it is a matter of ignorance and not them simply not caring. I've
come to find many people who work in marketing almost Trumpian in their
relationship with information.

~~~
libertine
I think the "them" should be broader than marketing - it's easy to point the
finger on the ones that write the message, but everyone was in on it.

"End to end encryption" doesn't show up in a marketing brainstorm that goes
unnoticed into branding creatives. Chiefs, Management, Product Teams,
marketers, engineers, product managers, everyone knew it.

------
johnnyfived
I feel like I must not be good at marketing because I find the emojis to be a
massive turn-off / distraction from the content

~~~
philtar
I think that speaks more about your capacity to focus than your marketing
ability.

------
shirak_untel
Great resource!

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.

I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience,
telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company
face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick. That's when
your company becomes a brand, and people can recognize with it

~~~
libertine
>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.

This is more about perception and something to aim at. It's extremely
difficult to develop a brand if you don't have anything to aim at, because
from the moment you have an hook, you can anchor pretty much everything based
on that and this allows you to do something that's extremely important in
branding: consistency and congruency.

Your brand, communication, product, should all be in line with what they might
not be yet, but are aiming at.

>I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience,
telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company
face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick.

Being transparent when necessary, yes. If you have something that's harmless
and innocuous, it brings no value to anyone to flag it.

Telling about progress works with a small minority, like a dev log works
mainly for that audience. Stripe, Facebook, Google, have a lot of this in
place to try to lure in talent, or more of that than to make people use their
product - so in a sense, this is a "marketing trick".

Most people want something that works, either from a tangible point of view
like a flash light that turns on, or intangible, like a piece of clothing that
makes them feel they belong to something that others will recognize.

------
dynamite-ready
Been looking for a guide like this.

Recently finished an MVP as a personal project, and was thinking about how
promote it. It's a daunting task.

It's nice to think that l337 design (well... It's functional, hopefully) and a
Reddit/HN post will be enough, but that's probably analogous to writing the
first test record to your dev database, techwise...

On top of that, confidence is a big thing. What if my core hypothesis is
flawed, or it's just a silly product? It's natural to want to innoculate
yourself against criticism and rejection... That's a fundamental psychological
feature of all nerds afterall.

~~~
chris_f
_" On top of that, confidence is a big thing. What if my core hypothesis is
flawed, or it's just a silly product? It's natural to want to innoculate
yourself against criticism and rejection... That's a fundamental psychological
feature of all nerds afterall."_

The trick is to remember that those responses are still better than the
alternative of no one using your project or caring enough to provide any
feedback. Users providing feedback is a good thing, even if it is negative.

I post a lot about my side project here and on other forums. It would be great
if everyone just knew about it and already decided if it was something that
they were interested in or not, but I know only a small fraction of relevant
users are even aware it exists.

For me, it would be way worse to spend time building something that people
might find beneficial but never got a chance to hear about, than sharing it
and being criticized on the internet.

~~~
dynamite-ready
Great promotional work! What's your side project?

Jokes aside, a large component of marketing is in aggregating opinion. The
other half is the dark art we famously complain about.

Aggregating opinion at any level is hard work. And it's almost been elevated
to a science now, so it has to be respected.

So to perform all that work to derive a conclusion which will most likely
(given all that's known about the probability of start ups and success) prove
you wrong, seems a perverse thing to do.

Masochistic, in fact.

I think it's easier to perform this work in the third person... It turns the
dynamic on its head (like the schadenfreuder one might feel when working on a
software project in the capicity of a QA tester). You're performing a clinical
service.

But it takes some special effort to willingly put yourself through it...

I dunno.

I suppose I'll learn more if I just do it...

------
k__
I saw a sales funnel for an app I built for a customer once.

99% people dropped before they even saw the app.

I could have built the best app in the world, and no one would have ever
known.

~~~
victor9000
That's one hell of a leaky funnel. Did you ever figure out the underlying
issue?

~~~
k__
Problem was the ads target audience was to broad.

------
petargyurov
Looks useful as I'm just getting into that sort of stuff for my business [0]

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
"reached" users were concentrated in Eastern Europe, even though my locations
were set to the US, Canada and Europe. All in all, it didn't yield many clicks
but for ~£10 I wasn't expecting much.

Reddit's ads are more expensive, and I was dissapointed to find that you can't
target just any subreddit. They have a list of "ad-approved" ones that you can
pick from. Campaign is still running but it already looks like it's reached
more people. Not sure if it's resulting in more clicks though.

[0] Shameless plug: [https://makely.me](https://makely.me)

~~~
guptaneil
Makely looks nice! Thanks for sharing. I sent the link along to someone who
was considering starting a 3D design business :)

I haven't signed up myself, but how are you planning on solving the
chicken/egg marketplace problem?

~~~
petargyurov
I'm glad you like it and thanks for spreading the word!

> how are you planning on solving the chicken/egg marketplace problem

The plan at the moment is to advertise whilst it's still in deveopment and get
a healthy user base of mostly creators. It will take time; I don't expect it
to blow up overnight.

I have worries when it comes to attracting enough "clients" because that's
significantly harder to advertise to. To start off with, the demographic we'll
be targeting will be general gaming and board game enthusiasts, as well as
some of the "creative" communities that exist on the web.

------
andy_ppp
I always enjoy
[https://marketingexamples.com/](https://marketingexamples.com/) it’s a good
one for lot’s of different ideas and how others did it.

~~~
harrydry
Creator Here: Cheers Andy. Appreciated

------
jes
Are there two different definitions of the marketing function in everyday use?

Some people seem to equate marketing with the promotion of existing products.
Some others see marketing as helping to determine the products / services the
company should build.

Are there better terms for these different functions in an organization?

------
rexreed
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'm reading Seth Godin's "This is Marketing" book right now.

------
jason0597
Product Marketing for Engineers, or developers/programmers? Because I have a
feeling that actual engineers (process engineers, systems engineers,
mechanical engineers, etc.) aren't going to be able to utilise this list.

------
mateusjatenee
That's actually extremely helpful. Thank you!

------
aswink
Really helpful. Thanks!!

------
lioeters
Original source: [https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-
Engineers](https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-Engineers)

\---

For what it's worth, one of the best articles in the list, for me, was
patio11's:

Business of SaaS - [https://stripe.com/au/atlas/guides/business-of-
saas](https://stripe.com/au/atlas/guides/business-of-saas)

~~~
jeremyw
Moderators: please update this post's URL to Lisa Dziuba's copy; most up to
date, and of course, proper credit!

~~~
dang
Ok, changed from [https://github.com/michael-andreuzza/Marketing-for-
Engineers](https://github.com/michael-andreuzza/Marketing-for-Engineers).

~~~
philshem
I would petition to add “Software” in front of “Engineers” in the title, and
perhaps adding “Product” in front of “Marketing”. I’m supporting a mechanical
engineer get his remote services business going, and as far as I can tell this
resource is _not_ of interest.

~~~
ghaff
Curious why not. It does seem to be oriented towards things that can be sold
to an audience that can be reached through email campaigns, social media,
Medium (uggh), etc. The emphasis would almost certainly be different if you
have a much narrower industrial focus where F2F interactions/sales may be
relatively more important.

I will say that the list of resources seems to be oriented towards tactics
more than thinking about what your strategy around the product is.

------
TheSoftwareGuy
Really? [https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-
Engineers/issues...](https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-
Engineers/issues/24)

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 _actual_ issues.

~~~
juped
This is inevitable when someone tries to turn forge hosting into social media
(and succeeds at it).

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

~~~
shpongled
Marketing, obviously!

