10.3 Upstream Influence: Marketing
The essence of marketing from the engineer’s perspective is aptly communicated in the film Office Space, where the marketing representative states, “I deal with the . . . customers so the engineers don’t have to.” In some organizations, marketing and engineering sit in tension, each taking credit for the creation of products, and each arguing that it has a more accurate view of customer needs based (according to the former) on sales and marketing data or (according to the latter) on customer feedback, warranty reports, and product tests. A consumer goods firm we worked with expressed this tension: Engineering developed a product roadmap completely independent of marketing’s product roadmap. Although it is plausible ...
Get System Architecture: Strategy and Product Development for Complex Systems, First Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
