Marketing Insanity
Earlier today I dropped this toot about context switching and marketing. I want to elaborate on this a tad, given the reputation we marketers have earned for acting out of our minds.
Marketing requires constant reporting on all activity; after all: we’re signing contracts and actively spending money, and we’d better have something to show for it. To accompany this, we have clear business goals against which we’re measured: generate traffic, convert traffic to lead, convert lead to purchase, etc. Every channel, campaign, and web page has its own goals that contribute to these larger goals. We report on these results weekly and monthly.
Now, imagine that for every feature a developer built, that person were then expected to monitor it, report on results, and constantly weigh its efficacy against all former and future features.
How is it being used? Could it be improved? Should it be cut? Is it accomplishing its goal?
In other words, imagine that every feature in the app cost actual money to keep. (The reality is, features do cost money in the form of time required to maintain and extend code.) Every day would become a balance between creation, release, and some part of the test-release-assess-analyze-iterate chain among every single feature that’s out in the wild. And these results would be reported on a weekly basis with charts and test plans and all sorts of analysis.
I don’t think engineers or product teams do this.
What would happen if they did?
