Demystifying Roles in a Modern B2B Marketing Department

As I’ve explained in previous blog posts, I come to marketing not from a traditional marketing background, but from product development and engineering. When I first showed up in marketing, I was as baffled as many of you might be by all the different roles in B2B marketing, and wish I’d had a primer to explain what all the different roles in marketing are.

This is that document. I hope it’s a handy guide for folks outside of the marketing department who need to interact with it. It’s also helpful for startups to understand what kinds of marketing they need right now and what types of people they should be interviewing.

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What is the difference between positioning and messaging?

I constantly hear folks in the industry – specifically, product managers and engineers – confusing these two concepts. It’s a huge sliver in my eye. Just like how senior engineers twitch when we in marketing confuse “AI” and “ML”, this is just as bothersome and needs clarification.

Why does this even matter? Fundamentally, it matters because product managers and engineers often complain about marketing teams “marketing” the wrong thing. Usually what this means is that we are messaging the wrong thing. But if the product hasn’t been correctly positioned, then the messaging is going to be garbage. To solve this, I’m going to propose something potentially controversial here: product managers should own the positioning for their products. Product marketing should own the messaging.

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Why I’m excited about Dark

The Dark language and coding platform launched this week, and I couldn’t be more excited. (I had half a mind to fly to St. Louis and see them launch in person at StrangeLoop.) For a while, I’ve been following what Paul Biggar (founder of CircleCI) and Ellen Chisa (a product leader whom I respect) have been building in Dark: a product to democratize software development and make it easier for everyone, particularly for folks who haven’t previously coded before. The frustration Paul expresses in his launch video –- about infrastructure and today’s delivery process getting in the way of delivering code – resonated deeply, particularly when I think about how we used to “deploy” in the early days of web software engineering (FTP-ing PHP files to production). Obviously, that was risky.

Today, however, in the name of risk reduction, we have complicated CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes and rolling deploys, thousands of lines of AWS CloudFormation and Chaos Monkey to kill it all, and a million other extraneous guardrails that developers today need to learn just to get something into production. An end-to-end, low-friction developer experience such as what Dark is providing is certainly appealing, not just for new developers, but for old folks like me who would like to program again occasionally but find today’s frontend and backend stacks daunting.

In this post, I’d like to give my thoughts in just three areas: what did Ellen and Paul and their team build? In what way could they reasonably go to market? And also – to address some of the early criticism about Dark, e.g. that it’s a closed ecosystem and not open source – does it matter? Are there are other valid criticisms and how could they overcome them?

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On leaving Chef

Yesterday was my last day at Chef Software. It is the second-longest I have been at any company — nearly six years. I have been very fortunate to have held four very distinct positions at Chef over my time there: professional services consultant, engineering manager, product manager, and finally, product marketing manager. When I contrast my experience working for a startup with the time I spent in the enterprise, I would, without question, state that this has been a better experience for me both personally and professionally. I could not go back to work for a huge company where the sense of urgency and determination to succeed are just not there, and where the needless bureaucracy snuffs out the flames of innovation before they have a chance to catch. I’m sure there are exceptions out there, but when I think about the poor customer experiences we all have interacting with our bank, college, grocery store, or health care providers, those are fundamentally a direct result of company-wide complacency driven by sheer size and corresponding market dominance.

It is also the first time for me leaving a company because I outgrew it — or maybe it outgrew me. In tech, we love to dump on the 99.99% of companies that aren’t Hacker News Hot Shit ™ while neglecting that many of them are doing quite well financially, thank you very much, and solving real customer problems. While the HN crowd is busy chasing shiny objects, the rest of us are off building businesses, and extremely successful ones at that. For me, though, there wasn’t much more I could do or wanted to do at Chef. The company is at a phase of its growth that is about immensely scaling the products it already has and deriving revenue from them, rather than launching entirely new product lines. As a product guy and engineer at heart, it’s therefore time for me to move along.

I wish my colleagues at Chef a great deal of success in the next phase of the company’s growth. It has been a privilege and an honor to have worked alongside so many of you and to have learned so much.

Some Thoughts on the 2018 XOXO Conference and Festival

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the XOXO Festival right here in Portland. For those who don’t know about XOXO (as I didn’t before I moved here last year) it’s a festival and conference for and by makers of things on the Internet: game designers/developers, programmers, filmmakers, comedians, artists, podcasters, and the like. A single-track daytime conference accompanies the evening festivities, packed with thought-provoking keynotes delivered by very accomplished people such as Jonny Sun, Ijeoma Oluo and Demi Adejuyigbe. It’s primarily this part of the event that I want to say a few words about. Continue reading

On Open-Source Business Models

Over the last couple of weeks, many open-source luminaries have written about open-source business models in response to Redis Labs’ modification of their license terms for some Redis Modules. Most of these blog posts dissect one thing: how does one create a business around open source? I actually think that this question, framed as it is, is kind of absurd. It sounds to me a lot like “how do we make money off the horses which have already fled the barn through the doors we left open?” Starting a company off on the wrong foot by giving away all of your valuable IP – and then figuring out how to build commercial products on top of whatever scraps of value remain – is silly. Many such conversations – led by technologists — start first with open-source zealotry and reverse into a business model which is the wrong way to do things. Instead, if you’re considering building a company based around an open-source foundation, first design the business model, and then contemplate how open sourcing certain pieces can serve as an accelerant to that business. If you can’t find an accelerant, maybe your business shouldn’t be based on your IP being open source. Continue reading

What’s In Amazon Linux & Why Might You Use It?

Just before Christmas, Amazon announced the release of Amazon Linux 2. In addition to the usual userland modernization (switching to systemd, providing a newer glibc ABI) and the Linux 4.9 kernel, you can now run it on premise; images are provided for VMware, Hyper-V and KVM. Sometime in 2018, Amazon will also start providing long-term support for Amazon Linux, similar to RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), by promising to support ABI compatibility for at least five years.

I’ve always been somewhat puzzled by Amazon offering their own Linux distribution to customers. No other cloud provider does this, although Google runs their own Debian derivative on non-customer-accessible systems. (For more on that, the slides from a talk they gave in 2013 makes for fascinating reading, in part because live-upgrading a 10-year-old base OS to a newer one while changing from .rpm to .deb is… terrifying yet awesome.) I decided to take a pretty deep dive into Amazon Linux 2’s feature set to see if there’s a compelling reason I could see for customers to adopt it. Continue reading

From Product Management to Product Marketing

I start 2018 in a new role at Chef, as director of product marketing. Five years is a long time to work at one software company, never mind a startup. I find I have to constantly reinvent myself in order to not get bored or complacent.

Prior to coming into product marketing, I’ve worked at Chef in professional services, engineering and product management. Now is the time for me to not only help with sales enablement, analyst and press relations, customer-facing materials, and so on, but to also learn how to build a high-quality sales pipeline. As someone who doesn’t hold an MBA but someday might want to start a company, these are critical skills for me to develop. Continue reading

An Elegy for Etsy

One of the biggest news events in 2017 for those of us working in devops was hearing about abrupt changes at Etsy. In April, institutional shareholders, disappointed by Etsy’s low share price, ousted CEO Chad Dickerson, and under new CEO Josh Silverman, proceeded to slash the workforce and reduce costs. Many talented engineers that I happen to know personally as well as CTO John Allspaw himself were either fired or saw the writing on the wall and made for the exits.

These events were discouraging on a number of levels. First, Etsy’s world-class engineering and web operations team scattered to the winds. Allspaw and many others contributed a great deal to the discipline of web operations by applying lessons learned from improving reliability in other fields, such as transportation engineering and nuclear safety. More importantly, though, is that Etsy’s very existence shone a light on whether it’s possible to build a socially-responsible company within the constructs of the current venture capital, and by extension, capitalist system. What is the place of the social democratic entrepreneur within these confines? Continue reading

Back to Blogging Again

I was recently re-reading Steve Yegge’s You Should Write Blogs post from 2005, and started thinking about why I don’t blog anymore. I used to be a pretty prolific blogger from before the days when these things were known as “blogs”. The archives here, in fact, go back to 2003, and although there is probably some pretty cringe-worthy content that far back, I’ve never deleted a single post.

So why did I stop? It comes down to a simple reason. As I’ve moved in my career from engineering roles into leadership roles, the topics I would consider blogging about have moved from systems and software to ones of organizational dynamics, individual behavior, and management’s role in facilitating the same. To properly write about these topics would require me to write about the actions of real people with whom I work. Although I would never name them, those folks would surely see themselves in my posts, and I’m afraid of being perceived as being mean when discussing everyone’s foibles. As my friend and colleague Adam Leff said, “No matter how much we collectively say we value honest opinion and transparency, we’re all still humans with brains capable of remembering what others say of us.” This makes it very difficult to talk about challenging topics openly.

Writing is especially tough in these partisan times. Fueled by hair-trigger social media, we are all too ready to jump to conclusions about the motivations of writers and ascribe specific intent to the choice of a particular word or placement thereof. We accuse people of “sub-tweeting” when they express their observations on Twitter, or label them as “toxic” on the basis of a small number of interactions. The halcyon days of 2005 Steve Yegge, where a blogger could just publish lightly-edited thoughts without suffering severe repercussions, seem long past.

I have, however, decided to return to blogging regularly. I will sometimes be writing about difficult issues, with the objective of sharing my experiences so that we can all learn and improve together. Yet I intend to treat everyone fairly and to be kind rather than “nice”. If you see yourself in these pages please try to bear this in mind. And since I have always spent almost as much time editing my posts as writing them in the first place, you can be confident that I’ve weighed all perspectives and I’m not just shooting my mouth off after having some drinks.

With that, onward. Next up this month will be a piece I’m working on in reaction to the New York Times’s recent article on what went wrong at Etsy. I hope you’ll read it.