1. Software development

If you’ve worked in digital marketing for any amount of time, especially agency-side, you’ve probably encountered friction when interacting with developers in your organization.

This friction might manifest as much too complicated processes for something as simple as a Data LayerA globally available JavaScript structure on the web page designed to pass information between the web page and the tag management system. change on the page. You might also face constant deprioritization of your marketing-related tasks in favor of other, more “tangible” or “value-adding” tasks in the developers’ task queues.

Whatever the case, it’s important to understand one thing:

Communication breakdown between IT and marketers is due to lack of shared goals and lack of mutual understanding of each other’s work.

For the first, the main solution is transparency and cooperation. You need to make yourself available to the developers so that they can better understand the purpose of your requirements and how they contribute to the overall goals of the organization.

For the second, this Handbook Topic will hopefully help you understand the developers’ mindsets better. And maybe you can ask the developers to consult the other Chapters of this Handbook so they can get a deeper appreciation of your work, too!

Whatever the case, as a technical marketer you have the unique position in your organization to liaise between the process-driven, technical world of IT and the hectic, service-driven world of digital marketing.

Admittedly, much of this Topic revolves around stereotypes. Just like there are a gazillion different types of technical marketers out there, there’s an equal number of diverse IT organizations that might or might not operate on the principles outlined in this Topic.

Even so, it’s important to understand some of these key processes employed by modern developer-led organizations, so that you can feel comfortable (as a technical marketer) when interacting with these teams.

Task queues and prioritization

One of the first blockers in your path to getting your marketing tasks approved by developers is the task queue itself.

Now, there are many ways of maintaining a list of priorities for developers. There’s dedicated software (e.g. Jira, Asana, Trello…), whiteboards full of post-its, or even an email inbox for individual developers.

To get your technical marketing tasks even included in the mix requires that you take the time to learn the processes of task assignment in your organization.

Most often this revolves around crafting use cases and promoting your task so that it will be easier for developers to prioritize them.

It’s important to avoid assumptions and to follow the processes diligently. You might be intimately familiar with Data LayerA globally available JavaScript structure on the web page designed to pass information between the web page and the tag management system. as a concept, but your company’s developers might not.

Writing the task so that it has all the information developers need requires quite a bit of technical understanding from you. If you just link the developers to an online resource, it’s likely they won’t prioritize the task any time soon, as having to go through pages upon pages of developer documentation for a platform the developer has never used before can be seen as unnecessarily time-consuming.

In a perfect world, you would find a trusted developer in the team, work with them to design the tasks while at the same time explain to them what the tasks mean. This is a great way to distribute information, but it does mean that you need a) a trusted developer, and b) availability from this person.

Another option is to insert yourself into the developers’ task prioritization meetings so that you can explain the backlogList of items that are waiting to be worked on by developers. items to the entire team. This is again a great way to disseminate information to a larger group of interested parties, but it does require that a) these meetings exist, and b) you have the knowledge and skills to explain your requirements properly.

Remember that the developers need to follow their prioritization processes so that they would always focus on the most relevant topics in any given sprint or unit of work. Don’t get frustrated if your tasks aren’t always prioritized. If you have time-sensitive tasks (such as an upcoming campaign), then that is a prioritization factor, and you need to be able to clearly state that when forwarding your requirements to the developers.

Deep Dive

How to write tasks and requirements

While there’s no perfect way to get your task prioritized, there are a handful of good practices to follow when crafting your requirements.

A good exercise for you is to always split each requirement into atomic parts. You can then offer the main requirement as a “user story”, and then you can link the smaller tasks to it. It’s always going to be easier for developers to take on a task like “Add the cart contents into the items array in the dataLayer” than “Build a proper purchase dataLayer“.

A task template typically needs to answer the “who”, “what”, and “why”. It also needs acceptance criteria, and you need to add all the relevant information to it so that it’s a self-contained task.

Here is a sample template you can use when crafting tasks and user stories.

Use whatever best practices your organization runs with. Remember to make the task self-contained. Ideally, by reading the task the developer would not need to consult you further, but do note that cooperation and participation are the best ways of getting tasks done, even if your role is to simply provide support.

Coding processes and tools

If you are confident enough with your technical skills, you might be tempted to write the code for your tasks yourself.

After all, if all the developers are busy with other tasks, who better to roll up their sleeves and do the work than you?

However, contributing code to an existing software project (such as your website or your app) is more than just writing some lines of code in a code editor somewhere.

Your organization is probably using a version controlA process of tracking and managing changes to code. Popular versioning involves "branches", where the main branch is separated from work-in-progress branches. system (such as GitProbably the best-known version control system in the world. Git allows multiple people to work on the same code without disrupting each other's work.) with isolated development and production environments.

There might be frameworks (such as React) or language extensions (such as Typescript) in use, and you need to know what the project structure looks like and what the process for adding new components is (or where the marketing-related components are maintained).

There is hopefully a style guideDocumentation that explains how the organization approaches the styling of things. Typical topics in a style guide include code styling (syntax and semantics) and UI / design element styling. available for coding practices in your organization. This spells out how code should be formatted, what best practices are observed in your organization, and how code contribution happens. If no such style guideDocumentation that explains how the organization approaches the styling of things. Typical topics in a style guide include code styling (syntax and semantics) and UI / design element styling. exists, then trying to identify development principles from existing code or by interviewing developers are available options, too.

You do not have to be an expert in programming or even well-versed in your company’s coding practices to be able to get your tasks prioritized. However, the better you understand the technical frameworks used by your developers, the more well-adjusted tasks you’ll be able to create.

Remember that developers are the ones who will read your tasks, and they’ll read them with their “developer brains”. They’ll have certain preconceptions about digital marketing, and if they need to align what they see in the task description with their existing processes without any further help or input from you, it’s possible your tasks will get deprioritized.

Deep Dive

Step-by-step for contributing code in a project

If you do want to contribute code to a project, here are general steps on how to proceed.

1. Request access to the project repository. The company is probably using a software management service like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. It’s a good idea to learn the basics of how they work first and to have a good understanding of versioningA process of tracking and managing changes to code. Popular versioning involves "branches", where the main branch is separated from work-in-progress branches. systems like Git in general.
2. Read the project README carefully. Hopefully, the project has a proper README file as well as additional documentation available. If not, you’ll need to get through the following steps by having a developer at your side walking you through what you need.
3. Install the project locally. This way you can write code on your own computer and test it in the local development environment without having to worry about messing stuff in the remote repository.
4. Carefully follow style guidesDocumentation that explains how the organization approaches the styling of things. Typical topics in a style guide include code styling (syntax and semantics) and UI / design element styling. and additional instructions. Often, there are best practices in your organization for how to write the code itself, how to organize the files, how to document, and how to write tests. If you want to start contributing code, you need to be aware of all of these things so that you don’t create extra work for the reviewers.
5. Isolate related work in its own feature branch. By using branches, you ensure that the code you write does not modify the code in the main, production branch. When your feature is done, you can then submit a request to integrate your branch into the main branch and thus make it available in production.

While versioningA process of tracking and managing changes to code. Popular versioning involves "branches", where the main branch is separated from work-in-progress branches. systems like GitProbably the best-known version control system in the world. Git allows multiple people to work on the same code without disrupting each other's work. have built-in protections for avoiding merge conflicts (where the same part of the software is simultaneously changed in different branches) and for quickly rolling back changes if problems arise, you still need to be very careful when contributing code you’ve written.

Check, double-check, and triple-check that you’ve understood the contribution guidelines in your project.

Automated tests and quality control

There’s more to writing code than just, well, writing code.

Your company might utilize quality control measures to make sure that whatever code is produced doesn’t break the buildGenerally used to denote a version of the app or software project that is waiting for release..

To avoid this code from being disruptive to existing, working processes, the build steps, where the code is compiled and deployed, typically introduce quality control procedures that must successfully pass in order for the buildGenerally used to denote a version of the app or software project that is waiting for release. to complete successfully.

A typical example of code quality assurance is linting. Linting refers to automatic checks for syntax and style errors in your code. At its most basic, a linter will quickly alert you if your code has obvious syntax problems that prevent it from working properly. But a properly configured linter comes with embedded style instructions, too, such as Always use single quotes instead of double quotes and Always use spaces instead of tabs. These might seem superficial, but writing code consistently is a service to others who contribute to the project.

Another important quality control step is testing. When code is tested, it means that there are test cases written against the code in the project. If a test fails, it means that something has broken in the code that invalidates the test results. At that point either the code needs to be fixed or the test needs to be rewritten.

For example, one of your changes might be to update where the value for an EcommerceE-commerce represents the industry of online sales. E-commerce covers online transactions that happen on the web, among other things. purchase is derived from in the dataLayer objectObject is a JavaScript construct that comprises key-value pairs. The Data Layer (a type of object itself) typically consumes objects of data.. However, in your haste to make the change, you didn’t notice that the value now uses a comma as the decimal separator rather than a period.

// Before
window.dataLayer.push({
  ecommerce: {
    value: '195.10',
    ...
  }
});

// After
window.dataLayer.push({
  ecommerce: {
    value: '195,10',
    ...
  }
});

When writing the code, you didn’t notice this. Luckily, the test coverageHow much of the code is "covered" by tests. Testing suites can quickly compute which lines of code would be accessed by any given test, and you can then see if there are important parts of the code that have no tests written for them yet. extends to these dataLayer interactions, and the test fails because one of the conditions is that currency values must always use a period and not a comma as the separator.

This issue is caught by the quality assurance step in the buildGenerally used to denote a version of the app or software project that is waiting for release. pipeline, and the task is returned to you to fix before the buildGenerally used to denote a version of the app or software project that is waiting for release. can be completed.

Writing proper test coverageHow much of the code is "covered" by tests. Testing suites can quickly compute which lines of code would be accessed by any given test, and you can then see if there are important parts of the code that have no tests written for them yet., utilizing linters, and making use of all the other available quality assurance tools in your software project will ensure that your code has smooth sailing from writing to deployment.

Again, if you do not want to contribute the code yourself, understanding what QA processes your company uses will help you design your tasks so that they are resilient to potentially breaking changes in the future.

When you write a task, try to anticipate what types of tests might be best to write against that task. Make the developers’ work easier by being proactive about this. You’ll also ensure that your code doesn’t break with future deployments!

As a technical marketer, you might find that your marketing-related tasks are frequently deprioritized by developers. Don’t be discouraged! Remember that it’s more about communication and shared goals than anything else. Make sure that you have a good understanding of how the development processes in your organization work, and do your best to increase awareness about digital marketing needs for other parts of your organization, too.

Quiz: Software Development

Ready to test what you've learned? Dive into the quiz below!

1. What is the biggest benefit of a version control system like Git?

Multiple people can work on the same code without disrupting each other's work

It lets you avoid breaking changes by running tests at build time

It makes it easier to document changes and milestones in the project

The main purpose of a branching system like Git is to allow multiple people to "branch" their code from the main, production version. By working on the code in your own branch, you avoid disrupting the work that others might be doing on the same code. Conflicts are resolved when the branches are merged together.

The main purpose of a branching system like Git is to allow multiple people to "branch" their code from the main, production version. By working on the code in your own branch, you avoid disrupting the work that others might be doing on the same code. Conflicts are resolved when the branches are merged together.

2. Why are code tests written?

To test whether developers understand the chosen code styles before letting them contribute to the project

To test whether others understand what your code does when you are ready to merge it into the main branch

To make sure that the code works in expected ways whenever something is changed in the project

The purpose of tests is to ensure that code works in expected ways (i.e. passes all the tests) whenever something is changed in the project. Even a single failed test is cause to abort the current build process and fix it.

The purpose of tests is to ensure that code works in expected ways (i.e. passes all the tests) whenever something is changed in the project. Even a single failed test is cause to abort the current build process and fix it.

3. Why are digital marketing tasks often deprioritized by developers?

Because digital marketing isn't as important as software development

Lack of communication, mutual understanding, and shared goals

Because developers are stupid trolls

It's difficult to prioritize something one doesn't understand. Lack of understanding of digital marketing processes is a common reason why marketing-related tasks don't seem to be getting any traction.

It's difficult to prioritize something one doesn't understand. Lack of understanding of digital marketing processes is a common reason why marketing-related tasks don't seem to be getting any traction.

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