[jakequade]

I think you're both giving marketing too much credit in the product's creation, and inverting the creation process in general.

> It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete

It's more like building a backend, then realising that the data structures could be improved when you're building the front. Marketing at best provides enhancements, not core changes (unless your product itself was incorrect to begin with).

Honestly, if your marketing affects your product as much as you're suggesting, you have a pretty unstable product.

[rapphil]

But marketing can help the dev team focus on the core functionalities that the customer really want.

[watwut]

No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep.

[speedplane]

> No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep.

Marketing is about exposing your product to your target customers. It's relatively orthogonal to product features.

[erikrothoff]

I disagree. Marketing gets people in. Users guide product development and thus the product. If an ”unstable product” is one that users actually want to use, then I guess an unstable product is a good thing?

[watwut]

Treating marketing as requirements gathering gets you overly complicated internally inconsistent requirements. The instability is side product. Marketing is not making trade-off between bugs and features, they are unaware of trade-off. When the "buggy" part happens, they treat it as "we have incapable developers" and not as reason to change something in process and requirements gathering.

By overly internally inconsistent I mean that at some places they will be impossible to fulfill. The code will always breaking at edge cases. The ui will do three things at the same time, will be incoherent and will be complicated for user to understand and learn.

By complicated I mean that you will have to code super complicated hard to maintain structures to fulfill everything at the same time.

Marketing can not be requirements gathering, because marketing is motivated to promise everything to everybody and to exaggerate. I dont use exaggerate here as euphemism for "lie" through that happens too. Exaggerating itself is a problem. Marketing is not motivated to build coherent analysis.

I know because I worked on projects where marketing was driving requirements . It did not led to happy customers, because customers were unhappy over instability and our inability to fill their requirements in a reasonable way.

[erikrothoff]

I’m pretty sure we are talking about different things. The marketing I’m talking about is in the context of sole developers or small developer only teams where the goal is to launch a successful product. Be it on a hobby scale or the start of something bigger. These developers/hackers gone founders need to evolve their marketing skills at the same pace the product is built.

I feel what you are talking about is a siloed approach where developers build what the marketing team promises to customers. If these teams are the same people you are the developer and marketing team, and thus over-promising things to customers is only shooting yourself in the foot.