5 things to know about marketing to become a better engineering leader

5 things to know about marketing to become a better engineering leader Build • Karim Matrah • 02/01/23 • 4 min read

I would have called myself a heretic to have written such a title a decade ago—back when I thought being an awesome engineer was only about technical challenges and certainly not product or marketing.

I used to think bringing the product into the market was easy. If the product is good, people will naturally come. So the only thing that would matter to succeed was building the product. I was wrong, and marketing changed the way I approached engineering.

The boom of SaaS in the last decade brought intense competition among SaaS startups, but it also brought a new way to ship products out to the market. Now, the product plays a more significant role in the buying process. I have worked in the B2B SaaS space for more than a decade now, and I particularly love joining startups when they are at the zero-to-one stage: when it’s all about creating a product to ship out to the market. That is when I understood through those experiences how complementary perspectives are crucial to being a better engineer.

I am a technical person, not a trained marketer per se. And through my journey building products, I got a few pointers that I found crucial when launching a new product, and marketing can impact your engineering culture. So what should you know about marketing as an engineer?

1. Product-Market Fit

Launching a new business or product usually starts with two minimalist elements: a team and an idea.

That team will then translate the idea into several hypotheses, each being a combination of a channel, a target, and a value proposition, that you test and measure.

Product-Market Fit

You will repeat those steps until you find THE combination that works better: the one that delivers a clear value quicker to your users and makes them return to you regularly. That combination may be imperfect, and users might even complain at first. If your users complain but keep using your service, it is a good sign at this stage: you are ready to improve from there instead of testing theories.

That is what we call the product-market fit - and it should be your first and only obsession at the beginning of your journey.

Finding your product-market fit is a challenging path, and it can become quite stressful. It requires testing multiple hypotheses and running experiments without a clear vision of when the results will be conclusive.

That period can be especially painful for technical teams as we prefer a clear understanding and vision to design systems properly.

For engineering leaders, your challenge would be ensuring your team understands that you are simultaneously iterating on the product and the market. You should aim to optimize for learning and be able to adapt as fast as possible. That would be key until you have enough data to bet on that one direction and consolidate your technical stack. During that time, documenting experimentations, hypotheses, and their results will help you get a step back to understand what to consolidate.

2. Product Positioning

Now that you have your first group of users, and hopefully users that love your product, you need to ensure that you understand them. What do they love about your product? A clear understanding of why they choose you and how they use your product will enable you to position yourself sharply on the market and get more customers like them.

This is called product positioning, which is the input of every marketing and product tactic.

The input of the technical co-founder is very much needed for your product positioning to be successful, as it will require going through a deep dive into what makes your product unique.

The book “Obviously awesome” by April Dunford profoundly changed how I approached products through engineering. This book gives a lot of insights on how to nail product positioning in ten steps.

It explains how critical it is to go through the alternatives your user would have used if you didn’t exist to understand how to position yourself. What are the unique features you have? What are those you don’t? The value and benefits they enable for customers, and then who cares about that value? In which context, those people will find you and see you as THE obvious solution for them.

Obviously Awesome covers a crucial part for engineering leaders: after several iterations working on your product, the product you will end up with won’t be the one you started with in the first place. But unconsciously, you might still be categorizing your product with how it started at the beginning. This won’t do you good because now what counts is how your new customers react. So you want to ensure you are aligned with the rest of the leadership team. Otherwise, you might not optimize for the future.

3. Customer Awareness

Now that your product is positioned, it’s time to inform potential users about it: it’s time for customer awareness. One thing to keep in mind when going into the market is that not all customers share the same level of awareness about their problems and the existing solutions.

Some are fully aware of problems and solutions - some partially, while others won’t have a clue.

Customer Awareness

You won’t be able to please everyone, especially on the bandwidth that comes with starting your product. So how about focusing on that one group of customers that understands their problems and the existing solutions? That will enable you to be sharper and reduce the pedagogy you will have to do to educate them on your ecosystem.

I have seen multiple times technical teams consider every customer feedback as equal. They are not (especially when the product has a free plan or a free trial), and that mistake can drastically slow you down or put you on the wrong path. As developers, we tend to optimize and anticipate too much and too early for the type of customer that isn’t fully aware of the ecosystem around your solutions and the problems it fixes when they give negative feedback.

There, as an engineering leader, along with the product team, you have to ensure the priorities, the main focus, and the order of operations.

4. Demand & lead generation

At this point, you should have a product that is clearly positioned, an ideal customer profile, and some social proof and testimonials. Because there is little room in customers' minds for every market category, you want to be top-of-mind for them.

That’s when content…