From time to time, marketers and developers may find themselves on different paths with diverging goals and timelines. Despite the apparent competing priorities, these two departments actually have a common goal: a positive customer experience.
Despite this goal, the differences and opinions of the other may lead to missed deadlines, false starts, rework, and tarnished relationships. Sound familiar?
Netlify invests heavily in solving the complex back-and-forth of developers and marketers, which is why we decided to give you a guide on how to improve relations between two of your most mission-critical departments.
The developer-marketer dynamic
Modern companies know developers and marketers are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, you have a team of highly skilled programmers working to create digital solutions using, quite literally, a series of foreign languages.
The developer community must deal with the technical aspects of digital products and solve problems like the code working one day and then not the next. They’re constantly working on how to make platforms more efficient and experimenting with developer tools to unlock the next wave of innovations.
On the other hand, you have a team of creatively-minded people working to take that digital solution and position it in front of various buyer personas. The product marketing team must focus on the audience message, brand image, and the return on investment (ROI) of your products.
Marketers have the unique challenge of highlighting the features and benefits of a product in simple terms while deciphering the more technical jargon of developers. Likewise, developers must remain adaptable to changing budgets and project parameters.
Positive relationships with marketers are essential for project success, meaning goals, communication, and respect must intersect. Working together is the only way to develop a customer experience worth returning to.
Characteristics of a strong developer-marketer partnership
While you should expect some departmental division, a strong developer-marketer partnership bridges the gap to give you the best of both worlds.
Open communication
Communication is a significant issue for marketers and developers, as miscommunication leads to extra work, required overtime, and damaged trust between departments. Marketers often struggle to put their goals into technical terms, and software developers struggle with adjusting to the specific needs of their marketing counterparts.
These challenges highlight the importance of open, transparent, and frequent communication. Breaking down departmental lines is a crucial first step in making team members familiar and comfortable with even introductory communication.
Text messages and email chains are fundamental tools for opening those communication channels. Other SaaS tools, like Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Twilio, can offer more robust features, such as team channels, dedicated project groups, file transfer support, and end-to-end encryption security.
Using these tools and fostering an environment that values open communication (even if critical) keeps the information flowing between departments. Open communication means fewer project errors, less overtime work, and more success in hitting deadlines.
Shared goals and metrics
Developers face key performance indicators (KPIs) that include cycle time, sprint burndown, flow efficiency, and code quality. Marketers deal with more human metrics, such as organic traffic, click-through rates, customer acquisition costs (CAC), and brand net promoter scores (NPS)/awareness.
Despite their differences, a few KPIs are common between the two departments, including customer satisfaction, customer lifetime value, and overall return on investment (ROI).
Marketers and developers want customers to love and use their products for as long as possible. These two KPIs improve the third (ROI), as more revenue for a specific project versus the cost of development, marketing efforts, and maintenance leads to higher profits.
Leverage departmental strengths
Without marketers, the best projects, software, applications, and websites wouldn’t matter. Likewise, without developers, the most lofty of designs would never leave the drawing board. Each player brings a set of skills that, when combined, are more powerful than either department is on their own.
An excellent example of both departments recognizing the hard work of the other is the video game Final Fantasy VII. Square developed the game with groundbreaking advances in game design and technical deployment, often hailed as a gaming masterpiece.
Recognizing the technical achievements, the company spent an estimated $40 million in 1997 money on marketing. Marketers focused on the cinematic qualities to showcase the advanced nature of the game in simple terms and to generate excitement.
These efforts led to the game becoming one of the best-selling video games of all time, with an estimated 14.4 million copies sold as of 2023.
Incredible results like these would never be possible without setting expectations between departments and tracking progress. It’s like beating a dead horse, but the most practical method is to set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Netlify can help you keep comprehensive track of your metrics, giving you a single source of truth for all notable KPIs. Check it out and start tracking today!
Key strategies for building effective partnerships between developers and marketers
We’ve talked about the importance of healthy relationships between developers and marketers, but how do leaders go about making these partnerships a reality? We found a few strategies that work particularly well, leading to success between teams, including:
- Joint planning and execution: Collaboration between developers and marketers means including representatives from both teams during planning sessions, meetups, and campaign launches. Understanding the workflow of other departments provides insight into the lives of our colleagues.
- Developer advocacy: A role in developer relations (devrel) that has someone act as a brand liaison for developers, understanding their needs, expertise, and pain points. An advocate who looks after the developer experience ensures that developers have the tools, education, and support they need to develop projects that meet customer needs.
- Measure success together: Success for one department should be a success for both. We mentioned joint KPIs earlier, and setting, tracking, measuring, and celebrating successes helps build a sense of camaraderie and investment between marketers and developers.
The more you can integrate teams together, the greater their working partnerships will be. If teams operate in the same building, consider intermingling departments so colleagues can work side-by-side. You can also host remote events to unify work-from-home team members, which builds connections and a sense of belonging, essential for productive teamwork.
How to overcome collaboration barriers between dev and marketing teams
While a healthy relationship between marketers and developers is ideal, teams will encounter some roadblocks along the way. These barriers come from the unique jargon, work styles, projects, and skill sets each department possesses.
Understand the divide
For starters, developers and marketers use different toolboxes to accomplish tasks. A developer might use an ecosystem composed of Notion for writing, Linear or Jira for project management and ticketing, and Netlify Drawer to leave feedback. There’s also a healthy reliance on forums like Reddit.
Conversely, marketers use content management systems (CMS) like WordPress or Sanity, project management platforms like Asana, Trello, and Monday, and Figma for graphic design. Marketers love to use templates for each marketing tactic to reduce fluff and for workflow optimization.
Foster collaboration
The differences in platforms and lingo create disjointed communication, which leads to project delays. One of the most effective methods for overcoming these issues is to establish shared definitions and foster open communication. Creating a shared glossary of technical terms and hosting regular workshops to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical language can significantly improve collaboration.
You can also invite marketers to hackathons, offer tutorials, or encourage them to join online communities like Slack or Discord. These platforms introduce them to concepts like open-source programming, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and SDKs, helping to bridge the gap between marketing and development.
At the same time, you can encourage developers to learn about digital and traditional marketing strategies, like identifying target audiences, outreach, content marketing, and product pricing. This in-depth introduction to each department helps build trust between marketers and developers.
Build a strong foundation
Another effective method is to practice a higher degree of empathy between departments. Marketers work closely with consumers and bear the brunt of front-line challenges. Developers must solve highly complex problems.
Respecting the demands each department faces creates an understanding of what our colleagues go through to make a project successful. When we have that understanding and respect, we communicate more clearly to make the job easier for everyone.
It also helps to have a platform that supports the wide range of tools that each department uses so everyone stays on the same page. While communication tools like Slack or Discord help unify teams, a platform like Netlify unifies communication and production.
Netlify as a catalyst for collaboration
Marketers often feel constrained by their reliance on developers for even the simplest content updates. In fact, a recent survey revealed that a staggering 87.42% of marketers desire more direct control over web content. Whether it’s a client website, a landing page, or an ecommerce shop, small changes often fall to the bottom of a developer’s priority list.
Netlify’s composable platform unifies departments through robust integration and API support and empowers streamlined workflows, making it easier for marketers and developers to get the job done.
Developers love Netlify because it enhances productivity through the freedom to select frameworks, the flexibility and security of the platform, the elimination of chores like CI/CD, and high-performance builds to startup development projects quicker.
Developers also love Netlify for the Netlify Connect feature, which delivers developer workflow to data unification. Programmers can also ditch server management, leaving it to Netlify to handle so they can focus on more impactful tasks.
Marketers also benefit from Netlify, thanks to the ability to make real-time changes to websites and remain agile in terms of content and SEO. No longer do marketers have to wait for a developer to make changes.
Marketers also find the headless CMS a great option for creating content at large scales with on-brand voice and image. It gives marketers the autonomy they crave and developers the programming support and flexibility to deploy complex applications.
Boost your developer-marketer impact with Netlify
A bit of understanding and respect goes a long way in fostering positive developer-marketer relationships. From including representatives from each department during meetings to settling on unified KPIs, several practical methods of building this relationship exist.
No one wants to work late because of miscommunication, and few still enjoy explaining to the boss why another deadline zoomed by without meaningful progress. The strategies mentioned to support the developer-marketer dynamic are solid ways to avoid those uncomfortable conversations.
Another sound strategy is investing in a platform that supports that relationship from the beginning. Netlify’s support of both marketers and developers makes it an ideal tool to unify these departments and support projects from conception to deployment and beyond. Request a demo of the Netlify platform and see the benefits for yourself!
