Marketing driven vs, Engineering driven tech companies

[howeird]

I forget if I have written about this yet.

There are two approaches to running a tech company:

Engineering driven. The engineers design and build a product, and sell it based on its merits. When customers ask for changes or improvements, engineering decides whether or not to make those, based on whether it fits the product, and whether it can be done. Schedules are based on when the engineers believe they can finish the product.

Marketing driven. Marketing asks customers what they want, tell engineering to build it, and sell it based on promises of future capabilities.  Marketing decides which features must go into the product, and set all the deadlines. The product ships when marketing says the timing is right.

I have worked for both kinds of companies, in tech support and QA, and by far prefer the engineering driven kind. One reason HP took a dive and is only a shadow of its former self is Carly came in and changed it from engineering to marketing driven.

Comments

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a book by Scott Adams.

[howeird]

Somewhat.
Dilbert is mostly trapped in an engineering job with a business manager boss (as opposed to an engineering manager boss).

[jwg.livejournal.com]

In my experience (from quite a while ago) I found that Marketing driven approaches tended to say - we want you to build next year's product for what the customers wanted last year. Engineering driven is more oriented to being bold and anticipatory to trends and possibilities for the near future.

[howeird]

Yes, I've seen that too. But where I am now, marketing is very much in touch with the customers' future needs, but not so much in touch with how many engineering and testing person-hours are required to develop those new features with the kind of quality the customers expect.