The Nomics Update

Why Our Developers Aren't Launching Anything This Year - (Ep. 0023)


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Hey. So this one might be a little bit off topic. Maybe it's not. No, it definitely qualifies as how I define this podcast as my journal. So I want to talk about why in my humble opinion and after years of bad experiences why I think launching [00:00:30] should be a marketing event and not an engineering event. Like, of course, a launch is a marketing event. Everyone gets that. But I think the thing here that's most important is that launching should not be an engineering event.

So I think engineering teams are notoriously bad for no fault of their own. But I'll just say not engineering [00:01:00] teams, engineering projects are notoriously difficult to predict in terms of when something's going to be done. And often I've seen startups and I have done this more times than I can count unfortunately, but oftentimes I've seen companies do things like plan a launch for a given day and maybe the engineering team is 25% done or 50% done or at least they think they are. [00:01:30] And everyone will come up with some date that's perhaps a little bit of a stretch but mostly doable in terms of when they're going to launch something to the market. And a marketing leader will sit down with an engineering leader, and the engineering leader is trying to do a good job. Maybe they just got hired, maybe they've been there for a while and they want to come off as a team player, and they're like, "Okay. We're going to launch this thing on this date." [00:02:00] And they proceed to coordinate around that. 

So heading into kind of the time of thing is about to launch, marketing and engineering gets together, and they're like, "All right. We need to create marketing collateral around this launch. We need screenshots." Well, the screenshots are ... Engineering will come back with like the screenshots are mostly done, but we have some mock ups. So we can create a demo based on this beta version that's on [00:02:30] a developers computer or I don't know, a mock up of the UI in something like envision or whatever they're using. And they'll invest a whole bunch of time in creating a video or marketing collateral around this launch that's scheduled for this date, but the thing isn't quite ready. But you need to create the collateral ahead of time. 

There's all this coordination cost that's incurred, right? Like weekly meetings. All right, is engineering on track? Is marketing on track? [00:03:00] Let's coordinate, and that eats up a bunch of time. All right. What features are we going to say exist in this when it launches? Here all are the features. Next thing you know a week before launch or two weeks before launch, it turns out that some of those features aren't there. Okay. We have to remove them from the video. We have to remove them from the copy or we need to rename this feature because it doesn't do exactly what we thought and it's going [00:03:30] to be out later or some aspect of the new thing is in beta but another aspect isn't that needs to be added to the graphic. There's just all this coordination stuff.

And if you've ever been involved in this, I'm sure you can attest to the fact that it just slows down engineering teams because they have to spend so much time coordinating and educating and providing status updates to marketing around the launch. And if they just use that time [00:04:00] focused on building the thing, it probably would get done a lot faster. 

So at Nomics, for the most part, we try not to use the word launch, right? So I like to say that we're not ...

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Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: https://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

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The Nomics UpdateBy Clay Collins

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