Roles
Having started off as a "real" electronics engineer, in 2000 I made the transition to Marketing. The initial setting was a Marketing team of 4, having to do all the gruntwork itself, all seated in a single cubicle in a small company making a loss. This evolved into a profitable pre-IPO company and finally a publicly traded company with a Marketing organisation sub-divided into Product Line Managers, Regional Marketing, Tactical Marketing, Marcom and Product Architects. So far, my job titles have included:
- Product Marketing Engineer (2000-2003)
- Self-employed tech writer (2004-2005), focusing on marketing materials
- New Product Definition Engineer (2005-2006)
- Technical Marketing Engineer (2006-2007)
- (Senior) Product Architect (2007-2009, within a Marketing organisation)
Duties
Most of what I've been doing these last few years can be summarised in a fairly short list:
- Product Definition
- Product Launch
- The tricky bit between Definition and Launch: an iterative loop driven by a dynamic market environment, close collaboration with Development, and tight timescales.
- Creation and maintenance of outbound and inbound documentation, sales collateral
- Sales support and customer visits
- Competitor analysis (focusing on technical product comparisons)
Formal Qualifications
Does a 10-minute run through the 4 P's back in 2000 count? That, and some good mentoring, is what got me through until October 2008 when I became Pragmatic Marketing certified.
Pontifications
Someone, somewhere has probably said this before, but here it is anyway - my own little philosophy of marketing:
- Know your product(s)
- Know your market (who might buy your product)
- Know your applications (how your product gets used)
- Know your technology (what other products you could be making)