7. THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE
• Throughout the ages,
technical and Marketing
people have been at odds
with one another
• Some say it goes back a
long, long way, to the
beginning ofTime itself...
10. BUT ARETHEY EVEN
HUMAN?
• They’re just, huh... Different
• They have different goals,
priorities and ideas
• For instance, they honestly
believe stuff like this works
to sell products
11. BUT IS IT REALLY A
CONFLICT?
• Some say it is worse than
trench warfare
• Others deny ever being
involved
• Most just wish Marketing
was outsourced to India
instead
13. BUT CAN WE EVEN
COMMUNICATE?
• Yes!
• But we approach things from different
angles
• Marketing wants features, and
doesn’t know how much it takes to
implement them
• Engineering wants robustness and
common sense
18. GEEKS CAN’T INTERACT
WITH NORMAL PEOPLE
• Geeks think of meetings as a
waste of time
• And they’re mostly right
• But that’s largely because
they don’t parse non-
verbal communication
• Normal people use
meetings not as a way to
decide things, but as a way
to reassure themselves
they’re doing the right thing
• And to make sure everyone
is in sync
24. SINCE WE CAN’T LIE,WE
ALWAYS SAY TOO MUCH
• We deluge people in too much
detail
• We make a point of showing off
what we know
• And what they don’t
• We treat meetings as a waste
of time and group
therapy
• And we often let them know
too much about what we think
• Because we’re tactless
• So we end up losing their
respect
• And, ultimately, their trust
• So no wonder they think techies
are hot-swappable
25. WE DON’T ABSTRACT
IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS
• To Marketing, you needing
Python 3000 is a detail
• To you, it’s a religious issue
• To Marketing, IE is just a
browser
• Okay, they have that one
wrong...
• To Marketing, how you get
things done doesn’t matter
• It only matters that it’s
done on time
• To you, it’s almost the only
thing that matters
26. ANDTHIS IS WHAT WE
SOUND LIKE
• “Yes, we can do that, but we
need to rebuild the
frobiscle and compile it
with the goosnargh so we
can do it in sequel.”
• “No way the scrabel is
going to work with our
partner’s ancient vorsiple
backbone.”
32. BUT WHAT ARETHEY
ACTUALLY SAYING?
Customer Penetration It’s not about sex
Customer Retention Stop scaring the customers away
Campaigns We need to put some ads up
Billing
We all need to
make money here
Focus Group
Someone else that hasn’t
seen this stuff, ever
Churn The ones we already scared off
33. YES,THEYTOO HAVE
JARGON, BUT IT’S EASIER
Commissioning
What we award the people
who actually make the sale
Segmentation
We want all customers
with shoe size 38
User Generated Content
We don’t want to
pay for content
Feature Parity
What we need you to steal
from the competition
Differentiation What they’ll steal from us next
Social Media
That new stuff we
haven’t figured out yet