The Gap Between Marketing Engineers and Engineers Who Work on Marketing

I’m pretty technical for a CMO and I’ve always wanted to be an engineer. I got close as a long time sales engineer, but no one wants me writing production code.

If I were coming up in marketing now, I’d have gone through the GTM Engineer / Marketing Engineer path. I do a fair bit of that as a CMO today. It’s fun and I’m pretty good at it.

But I also have a front row seat to watch real engineers do GTM work, and there’s levels to this shit. I’d be lucky to get a job on their team.

There’s a big gap between Marketing Engineers and Engineers who work on Marketing.

They look at the problems differently. They instrument things in a more thoughtful way. They bake security and observability into their work from the start. They write documentation. They care about architecture. You know, engineering stuff.

Us “marketing engineers” mostly YOLO, and if it works once for us, we ship. If we’re lucky, we’ll gitignore all those .env files that contain tokens.

I want to see more marketers get into marketing engineer roles, but I’d suggest y’all start with the engineering part before you get to the marketing part.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn.