S02E11 — NOV2020

Marketing & Product Design

Hello world and welcome to the twenty-third edition of this perpetual newsletter.

A surprising number of people took the time to let me know how useful they found the previous issue. Thank you.

In the old fashion of my own limited but biased experience, more of a pondering than factuality, I’m tackling this very complex topic with the idea of offering an angle for further discussion. Mandatory disclaimer done, check.

Ok, let’s do this.

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Tech startup founding teams are no longer exclusively reserved for engineers. Of course, this doesn’t mean all new startups are diversified from the get-go — most of them still aren’t. Depending on the product, market, strategy, budget, and groupthink, it’s often an either/or situation when it comes to hiring the first “non-technical” person. And from what I see, designers get in usually before marketers. 

Once both are on the alien terrain, their different natures start to surface. If they do not have a mutual understanding, they can easily create frustration with each other. What follows is my exploration of this premise.

Madison Avenue vs Bauhaus 

To better understand the current situation, let’s take a look back at where it all started. Both disciplines originated in very specific environments, respectfully unconventional for their time and place.

Madison Avenue is where, what used to be the American dream, was constructed pitch by pitch. Marketing agencies would pitch creative campaigns to huge corporations. Oftentimes without even seeing the product. The creativity of narrative and power of convincing was valued above everything else. Pushing the boundaries of reality, specialness, corporate ladder, titles, specific flamboyant lifestyle, post-war New York City, and the ‘60s.

On the other hand, we have a school of thought whose only goal was to blend art and craft and make it available in a form of aesthetically pleasing, functional, and affordable to the common person. Imagine if Apple and Ikea had a child. Rigorous and almost autistic attention to details, materials, and usability, opinionated neutralness, the product speaks for itself, pre-war Germany in the ‘30s.

These two were very different, maybe even incomparable. The former was disinterested in how the sausage was made, while the latter was all about the sausage. It would be an interesting thing to see if these two co-existed and needed to work together.

What it could be vs What it is

The time-space gap is now narrowed but still present. We are no longer Mad Men nor German scholars but the spillovers of their philosophies are still there.

In order to design a successful product, designers moved closer to the engineering trenches with the idea to advocate for the user. They optimize for usefulness and usability, system constraints, and company goals. 

Marketing still wears its slick suit while relying on design to keep them in the loop with the product. These two outsiders learned to speak the same language very quickly. While more exposed to the external world they are also isolated from the internal one. This can result in a lack (and loss) of valuable external feedback due to their inability to craft the right story for the rest of the team.

Understaffed and spread out, they are sometimes trying to do many things in parallel instead of delegating them to their colleagues. Things like writing blog posts or setting up website analytics.

Out of this desire to manage it all and frustration to make things look better than they are, they operate in the vacuum of potential product futures, smooth website animations, and imagined impacts on the industry. 

Growth VS De-growth

If marketers are hired to drive growth, designers are paralyzed by the growth. More signups, a few true “20%” users. More time spent on the website, less time spent on the task. More units sold, less but more durable units.

Good marketers are masters of setting up the strategy across the touchpoints, while designers can obsess about n variations of the same flow, unable to let it go. While everything that the designer wants for the product is to do just one thing but to do it right, the same way marketers can get into the funk of vanity metrics — nice to have, but not a priority for the business at the given moment.

Both are equally just as bad, and this is, I guess, one of the reasons both could be sometimes viewed as expensive and unnecessary roles for early startups. It’s obvious when things are bad. But it’s super hard to figure them out when they are going well.

Hubspotification vs Dribbblisation

Each profession has its own extremes and we all fall somewhere in these spectrums of delusionality. For marketers, that’s an old school approach to the emerging markets, not understanding users nor new mediums, and the inability to influence the product with the right metrics. For designers, this is blindly following design trends, not understanding the business context, or being too opinionated or not at all.

The same way designers are trying to artificially transplant someone else’s solution with the explanation “But this obviously works for them” or “But everyone already has this” (I’m not arguing against using best practices here), the same way I’ve seen marketers say “But we need this tool and this tool, and these metrics as well”. 

They are lured by inflated promises of these solutions and magical tools, but it is almost never about that. In my experience, the same folks would go radio silent when the flow doesn’t prove as successful or their tool proves to be useless or unneeded in the majority of cases.

Product Marketing

Is this the role of someone who is able to work with product teams and conceptualize features with them, but also place those features out into the world in a way that both potential customers and the rest of us would understand and appreciate?

They understand Jobs to be Done, users, features, and product capacities while helping with the offering. They are harder to hire, more specialized, and act as a bridge between product trench workers and slick propaganda suits but still looking pretty. Therefore only bigger and more serious organizations could afford them.

Is this role needed to finally bridge the gap, or do the rest of us simply need to get better at understanding and working with each other?

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I’d like to thank Bojana and Aleksandar — discussions with them helped me structure my thoughts and form this piece.

Further reading

• Printed creativity roundtable volume that I found at Cannes
• Product vs. Marketing
• Why “De-growth” Shouldn’t Scare Businesses
• Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data
• The dribbblisation of design
• How to Build an Amazing Relationship Between Product Management and Marketing
• This and this tweet