I’ve been a product development consultant for a number of years, and I don’t remember a time that we have ever entered an organization where we did not experience some type of battle or disagreement between marketing (a.k.a. upstream marketing/product management) and engineering. Unfortunately, the degree of coexistence between marketing and engineering varies from yelling and swearing at each other to polite backstabbing.
Marketing and Engineering Perspectives
The Engineering Perspective: Marketing Can’t Be Trusted
On one of our consulting engagements we were told that there were five different marketing people assigned to one project over a three-year period. Constant turnover of marketing personnel makes it difficult to build a strong marketing team that understands the product, competition, market, strategy, process, etc…
