Navigating The Crowded Marketing Technology Landscape

October 26, 2016

It’s funny that I write this from inside a box - CMS & Web Experience Management. Here in a crowded ecosystem of marketing technology companies - product managers have to learn which ones are the real deal v. vaporware. Here too, each solution provides a piece of puzzle that may not sync with the player next to them.

DevHub is your marketing suite built around the foundational experience of websites to landing pages and everything in between. 

Marketing Tech landscape

Product Managers firstly need to lay out the product road map. Spell out what it is you want to solve and for who. Be on the look-out for understanding what technologies are sustainable - not today but - forever. Forever is a hard word to wrap heads around as technological advances are happening at interstellar speed. Today, it's the mobile web - tomorrow it’s VR and location based display targeting. 

Product managers cannot survive without learning to anticipate whether the next trend itself is sustainable - remember: flash?  So, how does a product manager pick the right technology company? - simple - PEOPLE. People are behind all 3000+ marketing tech companies - learning which ones are committed to innovation is the hard part. A good place to start is ask to see a company's github commits - average 2 to 3 a day per technical employee. As a baseline: since July 2009 DevHub has 16k commits and 128 releases logged in github. 

Once in awhile marketing tech companies are started by executives from other technology company’s who themselves are looking for tech talent to create a ‘New’ technology - this is bad. Technology companies should have at least 1 technical co-Founder from the start. 

Martech has come a long way since 2011. Agile tech is key to adapt to your unique solution -picking the right tech that's the skill/ experience of a solid product manager.