What's been happening in martech?

In a recent Humans of Martech podcast, the host asks multiple marketing professionals to respond the following idea (from 2019):

Martech faces decline due to in-house engineers who are increasingly handling tailored solutions in-house, and the success of vendors hinges primarily on serving those engineers, not marketers.

Obviously, we've seen the martech landscape explode and while there might be more teams building in-house martech solutions today than in 2019, there are certainly far more organizations buying instead of building solutions from scratch.

the value of an operations professional lies not in owning and maintaining tech but in resolving business problems by aligning the right people, technology, and tools to accelerate pipeline generation. The engineering work in martech spans across data, data engineering, IT, and business operations, but this is just one aspect of a martech professional’s role.

This is such a great point, in my opinion. An effective DXP solution requires people in multiple roles, communicating well, and all aligned towards a common goal.

Another episode guest mentions why engineers might not actually like the idea of building marketing solutions:

“A lot of the engineers I’ve worked with cannot stand the chaos of marketing.”

I suppose chaos for one might be excitement for another, but I think developers will find working with marketers is a lot less confusing and chaotic the more they understand marketing itself.

Xperience as martech

If you work on an Xperience by Kentico solution, you and your team are already convinced that the return on investment and total cost of ownership equation work out in favor of buying a platform instead of building one from scratch.

There's some great arguments for buying vs building in this episode:

For example, fintech companies should focus on developing financial technology products rather than martech products. “Do you really want to spend your limited engineering resources on building martech products or on products that drive growth?”

From my perspective, this strongly reinforces the idea that engineers working on Xperience by Kentico solutions are valuable because they are specialists who can deliver a great marketing solution better than any other developers. That lets organizations focus on their key value, product, or service offering.

Ultimately, the answer is context-dependent. It hinges on how closely embedded the engineering team is with marketing and whether there is a dedicated resource to bridge the gap between marketing needs and technical capabilities.

I think this is also an important point to call out. In a traditional product team, product engineers know the product and customers really well - they have to, because their goal is to build what the customers need. Similarly, an engineering team working on a DXP solution needs to understand their customers - the marketing team using the solution.

Can developers learn marketing?

Another guest remarked,

“A marketer can be technical, but an engineer can’t necessarily be strategic,”

I'm definitely biased, but I completely disagree with this point. I think engineers can and should be strategic - helping to bridge the gap between marketing and technical. I feel like this guest has had some poor experiences with engineers who didn't know, understand, or share the marketing team's goals.

I've believed for awhile now that technical teams should be able to explain the marketing goals (measurable achievements) and priorities (ranking of competing needs) of a DXP solution.

Ten to fifteen years ago, engineering departments handled all technical requests from marketing, sales, and customer success. Now, each department, including marketing, is hiring its own engineers.

This blurring of lines between roles is reshaping the landscape. Engineers are now integral parts of marketing, sales, and customer success teams, rather than being confined to a separate engineering department. They bring technical expertise directly into their respective areas, allowing for more tailored and efficient solutions.

This is a shift I'm also seeing and I think it's really important to acknowledge and lean into. In 2010 any web developer could build or work on a CMS product used by marketers, but today there are additional skills unique to the world of martech - content modeling, multichannel, customer data integrations - that are so important these technical roles have become a specialization.

Am I a martech engineer?

This podcast episode changed how I think of myself, my technical skills, and the role they serve.

From 2013-2023 I worked for a Kentico partner agency and thought of myself as a software developer (a web developer, specifically) who worked on CMS and DXP solutions. I also worked on line-of-business apps and various other projects, but most of my time was spent working on building websites with products like Kentico.

During this time "marketing" was always another team, not mine. The marketers working for my agency did their thing (I had no idea what that "thing" was) and my team coded and built web applications. Eventually a project would launch and my team would hand off the Kentico solution to the marketers to do their job (whatever that was!)

I never thought of myself as a martech engineer, or even a developer that built marketing solutions - I built ASP.NET applications that happened to be used by web administrators, content managers, and marketers.

I think this was short-sided perspective that limited the impact I could make!

I do a lot less day-to-day software development since I started working for Kentico, but when I build martech solutions I try to see it through the eyes of a martech engineer.

Wrap up

The episode host includes this in his summary:

Let your in-house engineers focus on product and data while leveraging the cutting-edge solutions and support offered by specialized martech vendors. Unless you’re planning on building a martech company, leave the martech to the experts.

Again, I think it's a great opportunity to run towards this as an engineer working on CMS and DXP solutions - we are experts, we understand these specialist products, and we should embrace that by exploring more of the world we work in - digital marketing.

Check out the full podcast episode, Re: Why Martech is Actually for Engineers over on Humans of Martech.