Marketing & Engineering: Two Creative Sides Of The Coin

You'd think that they'd mix like oil and water.

One very rational and left brained. One working with emotions, feelings and their right brain. One analyzing black and white data. One working with perceptions. An engineer and a marketer, couldn't be more different, huh?

Actually I found that engineers and marketing professionals are very similar in one critical area: creativity. Though each may come at the problem from a very different starting point, both can look outside of conventional thinking and come up with creative, mold breaking ideas.

One of the many fun things about working for mid-sized companies is the nearly forced collaboration among various parts of the organization. Most mid-sized companies are not yet so expansive that the potential functional silos/haystacks/castles/fortresses (well you get the idea) have not completely taken root. This allows an environment for cross functional teams to work together and thrive.

There is nothing like a passionate marketing product manager working with a passionate design engineer on a new product or line extension. Each will come at the initiative from a completely different angle. Put both the rational and emotional, data based and perception based, left and right brains of engineering and marketing together, and the collective results can be a truly innovative new product for your company. I have personally seen this work on everything from software to storage systems.

So how is your organization doing? Do your engineers and marketing folks collaborate on new products? If not, what would be the product line they could address and what are the first three steps to getting the project rolling?