Shared goals, shared success
I run developer relations for MongoDB. My team is filled with engineers who write code and eschew marketing. Yet my team sits within the marketing org. Different companies do this differently, with some developer relations teams housed within the product or engineering groups (as we used to be at MongoDB). But in my experience, developer relations fits better within marketing precisely because few (if any) within my team would consider themselves marketers. For a company that focuses on serving developers, the last thing we want is traditional marketing. Instead, we want “marketing” to look like deep technical workshops, how-to tutorials, etc.
None of this works without being joined at the hip with more traditional marketing functions. My team knows, for example, that all their work has to support larger business goals. At the same time, these other teams (strategic marketing, field marketing, digital and growth, etc.) also know that they can count on us to support them and help inform the work they do.
This confluence of different functions isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and it’s something that needs to happen well beyond my developer relations team and marketing. The best companies, whatever their industry, marry technology with business functions. According to Gartner VP Daniel Sanchez-Reina, “To become a digital vanguard, CIOs … need to prioritize four areas: making digital platforms easy for the workforce to build digital solutions, teaching them the interdependencies between technology and business, helping business leaders become innovation leaders at digital, and expanding digital skills beyond the IT department.” Technology, in other words, isn’t meant to sit in a silo. It needs to be central to how all areas of the business operate.
