I was reading today’s First Round Capital post about The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers. It’s a great post that talks about how there is often a tension between the needs of marketing and engineering. Given how deeply ingrained marketing technologies have become, there is a huge need for programmers, designers and hackers of all types to mount a first-class marketing strategy, and in the case study above they advocate (correctly in my view) that companies have a separate engineering team devoted specifically to marketing projects. That got me thinking…
Young companies that have some level of success inevitably experience “growing pains.” Sometimes (okay, always) part of the pain is in scaling the core engineering product. Think of the many Fail Whales Twitter put up when they frequently exceeded capacity a few years ago.
But there are tons of other important-but-not-urgent engineering tasks that need to happen as well. Unfortunately, companies are often either shortsighted about prioritizing these tasks, or they ignore them all together until it needs a fire drill.
Here are some of the tasks that come to mind:
- Integrating an email signup form on your web site
- Syncing email signups between your database and an external email services provider
- Setting up SalesForce or some other lead management system… and getting people to actually use it
- Integrating said lead management system with your internal systems
- Capturing and charting key business metrics so everyone knows the “state of the business” at all times
- Analyzing how various strategies interact with each other (e.g. to what degree do our current SEO efforts lead to more sales?)
- Setting up and training users on a customer support system
- Extracting data from the core to make it useful to other business users, or even end customers (e.g. analysis of Tweet data, which is why Twitter bought Gnip)
- Building sample applications on your API to demonstrate its capabilities
- Integrating Facebook Like and Tweet links to various content streams
I just thought these up in 10 minutes. Given time I’m sure I could think of at least a hundred.
That’s where you come in.
I’m creating a list of these kinds of growing pains that are important, but shouldn’t necessarily consume core engineering resources. What are some of the growing pains you’ve experienced? What’s something you dropped the ball on and it later came back to bite you?
I confess I have an ulterior motive. I’m pondering the creation of a services firm that focuses on “growing pains” type problems as it core competency. I’m not sure it’s a true market need, or what kind of messaging would succinctly communicate these pain points. I welcome any thoughts you have on both non-core engineering tasks and how to communicate it from a marketing perspective.
Post a comment below or email me at me@derekscruggs.com with your thoughts.