Technical Marketing — Part Two
August 12th, 2008 by David GuzemanIn this post, I’d like to make a couple of points. First, titles don’t matter. Although you’ll almost always find people with product marketing titles, you’ll rarely find them with tactical or technical marketing titles. I really don’t care, nor should you. What’s important is that the functions are getting done and that they’re assigned to specific people. I want to be able to look at an org chart and know who is doing product, technical, and tactical marketing. And I want to be able to point to people and have them tell me which of those functions they’re doing. Technical marketing people typically carry titles like Product Marketing Engineer, but as long as they’re working the technical literature and issues, and answering customer technical questions, that’s all I care about.
The second point, and the real subject of this post, some functions can be spread across several places in the organization. Now with one exception, I resist doing that because I want people to know they own their functions and take responsibility for them. In the last post, I implied that I had “invented” technical marketing, and that is not strictly true. When I got to Zilog, there were already engineers embedded in the Product Marketing triads doing the technical function. What I came up with was the idea of having a separate group, this time actually called Technical Marketing, in addition to the tech marketing engineers in the triads. How this came about is an interesting story.
Arriving at Zilog I found myself heading a combined marketing department for two divisions that totaled about 120 people! The structure was very confused, and to be honest, it took awhile to work it out — the result is the six functions that make up the complete marketing function, what Mindpik calls Big-M Marketing. But one of the shockers was finding that the major new products being developed were being done with no customer contact, and not even any marketing involvement. The design engineering group had defined what they thought the next generation of products should be, but they had done it in a vacuum. Now they were several years into a long design cycle on three major new product families. To be fair, when I looked at what they had defined for those new products, I was impressed. But walling this off from marketing and customers was just insane.
As I dug into the people in the engineering group finding out who did what, one key person kept popping up. Dave, a soft-spoken Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, had done his doctoral work on cache memories… the key to all of the new microprocessor architectures across the industry. He was responsible for one of the key new product families and was working a second, behind the scenes. Doing a new processor literally meant writing a book — a design specification book that spelled out in excruciating detail how each instruction worked, the interplay between the registers, and even elaborate descriptions of the circuitry tying things together. Dave had written that book for his family, and it now served as the design bible for the team of chip layout designers who were implementing the chip.
Perhaps one of the reasons that engineering did not work with marketing on the new product definition was that it was so complicated. That book was several hundred pages long! But the fact that these new products were being done totally in design engineering had an unintended consequence. Engineering was ignoring marketing — worse, had no respect at all for them. Truth be told, I was sypathetic with their view, because marketing had not been doing their job. And getting them to do that job was my job.
There was no way that I could educate them (or cause them to become educated) in the technology to the level necessary to make real contributions to that new chip definition process. So I did something that ultimately turned out to be better. I moved the chip architects out of engineering and into marketing. It was not a one-call sale. I had that Carnegie-Mellon architect out to lunch, to dinner, to meeting after meeting while I worked that sale. At first, he was incredulous. My response was, “join marketing and I’ll make you a star!” I wanted our chip architect to be out in front of customers, to be at the industry conferences presenting papers, to be available to the sales force, and to be responsible for actually getting the new chip to market. In the end, I think that was the telling argument. By joining marketing he would be able to continue to work his baby and make sure it was successful. A lot better than just throwing it over the wall into marketing which was the original practice.
It worked spectacularly. First, the company was shocked that Doctor Dave had left engineering to join marketing. It obviously signaled a sea-change in the way the company was going to define products and take them to market. Dave went on the road speaking at many of the industry conferences and traveling to the key customers. I always knew that when the going got technical, I could just leave the room for a half-hour, and when I went back the customers would have come over to our side. Having a tech-talk with Dave was such a pleasant experience you never noticed how he manuvered you onto his side of the issues. I have no idea how many customers he turned around for us. And he continued to be the architect, making himself available to the engineers at all times to answer their questions and sort through issues with them.
A few months later, the other key architect knocked on my door and came in to to ask if he could join the new group too. Clearly marketing was where the action was! We took him gladly and then added some staff help for them. One of those additions was the best presenter and press contact I’ve ever known. When we were done, every time a competitor announced a new product, the press would call Zilog Technical Marketing to get our reactions and we would get paragraphs of editorial coverage in those stories.
At this point, you should be asking how this Technical Marketing group related to the tech marketing people embedded in the triads. My rationale for having a separate group was that the new products were not going into any of the existing triads. When they actually got close to going to market, we would create brand-new triads for them. Technical Marketing, the group of architects that had defined these new chips, would work the transfer of responsibility over an extended period of time to make sure nothing was dropped in the hand-off. Zilog was always doing new chips, and many of these were straightforward extensions of the existing products. Those were handled by the triad that ran the original products. It was only the giant departure products that were handled by Technical Marketing.
It took more than just moving the key architects into marketing to get respect from engineering, but with those moves we were on our way. I’ll talk about the other way we got their respect in the next post. Oh, one more thing — we did make stars out of those Tech Marketing wizards. There’s no point in having wizards if you hide them. You have to give them star status to give them the credibility and impact you want.
