I recently had an email exchange with an individual who was recruiting engineers, and someone with PR experience, to get a new startup off the ground. I inquired about the need for broader marketing skills. The response:
“Part of the problem is until you have a really firm idea of what you’re building it’s really hard to figure out how to market it. For example if you start out with the idea of selling a product focused on say insurance there would be two possible markets for it, the customer and the insurance company. The marketing for selling to a company is totally different than the marketing that you would take to sell to a consumer.”
I guess figuring out the product then figuring out how to sell it is more of an engineering mindset rather than a pure marketing mindset.”
The notion – practiced by many tech startups — that we need to choose between either a so-called “engineering” or “marketing” mindset seems to me misguided. Maybe this is because, as an electrical engineer who has spent the past 18 years creating and marketing new technology-based ventures, I have lived in both worlds. But how can you hope to create a real business without, from the beginning, taking seriously the needs of the market and how you will attract paying customers? At the same time, how can you hope to create a product that relies on technology as its underlying foundation without, from the beginning, taking seriously the capabilities, limitations and costs of building it? In any case, my experience is that leveraging the expertise of both engineers and marketers in a collaborative and iterative process — rather than a siloed and sequential process where engineering precedes marketing or vice-versa – results in a better product getting to market more quickly.
The risks of pursing an “engineering” mindset are well understood, the most common being the creation of a product that doesn’t meet the needs of a specific customer segment significantly better than existing alternatives. On the other hand, pursuing a “marketing” mindset can lead to equally bad outcomes, such as defining feature requirements that cannot be built with current technology or resources, or overlooking opportunities where technology can enable breakthrough innovations that are valuable to customers.
When Mark Britton and I started Avvo – a lawyer search website — we took mostly a collaborative, iterative approach. Rather than jumping immediately into product definition, we started with basic market research to help us to deeply understand the customer problem, and then quickly transitioned into brainstorming product features and assessing technical feasibility.
Our market research was relatively quick and inexpensive. We conducted interviews with upwards of 20 lawyers in Mark’s network. Importantly, our conversations didn’t focus on getting reaction to a specific product concept. Rather, we asked general, open ended questions and continually probed to understand the reasons behind the answers. We did the same on the consumer side, asking friends, family, and acquaintances to share their experiences choosing a lawyer. We scoured the Internet for market research, and found a treasure trove of free information from the American Bar Association, the Yellow Pages Association, and our competitors’ web sites. We studied products targeting the legal market, as well as products in other verticals like health care. Finally, we sifted through all the interviews, data, and competitive analyses and boiled them down to a few core insights that reflected our understanding of the opportunity.
These core insights formed the basis around which we brainstormed product features. As we generated ideas we wanted to quickly understand the technical implications, which then enabled us to discard or refine our original ideas and generate new ones (while we recruited a VP Engineering we relied on former colleagues to participate in brainstorming and provide technical guidance). The process was highly iterative: new learnings about the market informed product ideas; new product ideas led to a better understanding of available technologies; and this understanding of technologies led to more, better and achievable product ideas.
We continued this process until we had created a product blueprint that would meet market needs and be technically viable. By the end of the process we were confident that if we executed well we had a good chance to have a real impact in the marketplace.
This cross-functional, iterative process isn’t perfect nor is it easy. There is often an urge to push off market and technical research and jump immediately to product definition. Perhaps most difficult are the organizational and team issues that have to be managed. However, in my experience, it is more likely to lead to a successful outcome than starting a company with a purely “engineering” or “marketing” mindset.
What is your company’s mindset?
Paul Bloom has conceived, launched and managed dozens of new software and online products for consumers and businesses. His most recent entrepreneurial venture was as co-founder of Avvo.com, a lawyer search web site. Paul is currently consulting with technology companies to help them identify and exploit new opportunities for growth.
About Nathan Kaiser
