Top 5 Things IT and Marketing Fight Over
#1 – Which is more important getting it out on time or getting it out bug free. Okay this one differs from org to org, team to team. I’ve actually argued on both sides of this one. I argued for just getting the damn thing out when it was 12 months late. I’ve argued for more testing when the previous two versions of the software were full of bugs. I mean really…
#2 - Whether or not uses cases have been properly documented. This gets tedious when you are talking about changing the name of a field or something. On the other hand, I’ve also had IT point out that if we give the customer ‘feature X’ then ‘feature D’ will work differently. It’s best to have a good working relationship between IT and product marketing.
#3 – Whether that problem the customer is having is because their environment is ‘jacked’ or because the software has a bug. Let me tell you – this generally results in a lot of people getting involved in a technology version of ‘he said/she said’. Generally, I ask my friendly tech support people to try to reproduce the issue on a clean system. This usually ends the debate.
#4 – Whether a product feature is important or not. Marketing generally spends a great deal of time vetting features before introducing them to the development team. Features may be submitted by customers, by sales or vertical market teams, by channel partners, by tech support or by other development teams who have some dependency on the products. It’s marketing’s job to decide which of these requests are compelling and create a differentiator for the product. Often marketing will go to great lengths to show the relevance and importance of a feature (or even a new product altogether), only to have IT say “eh - customers don’t really want that.”
#5 – What the future of the product line holds. Again, this is an area with a strong relationship between IT and marketing is critical. Marketing brings to the table industry trends – competition, technology, etc. IT brings to the table the core technology expertise and the wherewithal to understand what’s coming next that customers will likely want to adopt. The challenge is to be cutting edge without leaving slow-to-change enterprise customers in the dust.
