Marketing is easy, technology is hard

Hello there from Chris Halliwell, Director of the Technology Marketing Center,

This is a series of posts about the qualities of a technology marketing leader that starts with a confession.  Here it is:  I'm not an engineer.  Although that plain fact hadn't stopped me working on an NSF grant, or getting an MBA, or selling for IBM, when I got to Intel about 10 years into my career, it was a genuine challenge.  I'm not even sure why they hired me.  Was it that the back water memory board business was not that technical?  Was it that I'd worked briefly as a product manager at a Silicon Valley company known for good product managers?  Was it a mistake?

Soon enough it became clear that the legendary leaders of Intel firmly believed that if product managers were not "technical enough" they would be shackled by lack of customer application insight and most likely deceived by bogus engineering schedules. How could a non-engineer manage technical documentation, or support a technical sales call, or guide a technology roadmap?  The cold hard fact is that management had a point.  The old saw is true:  it is easier to teach a technical person about marketing, than it is to make a designer or a scientist out of a Political Science major.

My response to this dilemma continues to inform my career to this day.  At Intel I quickly became all about team process -- get process right, lead the technical team with a rational approach, sound principles, and good data (and find friendly engineering buddies) and you might just thrive.  My belief in marketing process, particularly strategy development process, led me to teaching and consulting.  But I'm just one individual.  Companies that depend on technology-driven value creation need a scalable way to address the need for excellence in highly technical marketing managers.

So that's why I teach marketing to technical professionals, and that is what this series of posts will be about.  What is it about the technical mind that makes market-driven thinking difficult?  What are the limitations of traditional classroom business education?  How are companies who rely on highly technical marketing leaders doing to address this problem, and what is working?

The posts lead up to, and end with reflections about, the Executive Interview we'll be podcasting on May 27 with Dennis Fritsche from Texas Instruments about their creative Product Marketing Manager Development Program.  I hope you stay with us through the series, and join us on the May 27 conference call.