Martech practitioners operate at the intersection of marketing and technology. As such, they can be placed at different places on an organizational chart.
Where they are in the organization affects their responsibilities and the associated martech job description. Understanding this also helps with martech team formation.
Where martech fits in the organization
As a martech practitioner, I have sat in marketing, IT and on a product team. It has been interesting to observe how this has affected my role. While it didn’t have as much impact as the circumstances of my employer and the competition, it still significantly influenced my work.
Tools that were once highly specialized are commonplace across many departments. This is especially noticeable in martech, where IT is increasingly integrated into marketing and other areas. This trend will likely expand as technology progresses, blurring the lines between departments and influencing how martech practitioners work within organizations.
Further, determining whether a platform or system is martech can depend on several factors. These factors, in turn, influence how martech is managed within an organization. Let’s also not forget the nuances that the RevOps and customer operations perspectives bring to the table.
Some companies now have commercial organizations encompassing marketing, IT and other functions. With all due respect to Scott Brinker, who coined the term “martech,” much of what is considered martech today will eventually just be marketing.
Thus, where a martech practitioner sits on an org chart may have less influence on their role than in the past. It is interesting to compare what it is like to report to career-long marketers, former programmers and enterprise architects.
These are generalizations: Divisions of labor and responsibilities vary from organization to organization.
Martech’s role in marketing
When martech practitioners sit in marketing, they are naturally close to marketers — the ultimate stakeholders of martech projects. However, regardless of where martech practitioners are placed, they must remain in sync with marketers. That will take more effort for those who don’t sit in marketing.
In many cases, they are the primary liaisons between marketing and IT. They may attend regular meetings (like a daily scrum) with IT staffers assigned to marketing projects. So they likely have to answer IT’s questions regarding requirements, KPIs and prioritization.
Also, they can help translate marketing business needs into user stories and tickets. That way, they can specialize in translating business needs into IT needs, allowing other marketers to focus on what they’re primarily charged with — like creative teams that are focused on creating collateral (digital or otherwise).
Sometimes they partner with IT teams to help accomplish IT priorities within marketing. Some examples are helping with business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) planning, user audits of core organizational systems and tech debt evaluation and elimination.
Since martech practitioners who sit in marketing are close to the stakeholders who fund projects and platforms, they are in a good place to work with procurement starting, renewing and sunsetting contracts. They can also help coordinate between IT and legal stakeholders as they have information security and regulatory evaluations to conduct.
Dig deeper: Why organization management is crucial for marketers
The role of martech in IT
Martech practitioners who sit in IT are likely key liaisons to marketing. In addition to attending regular meetings with their martech counterparts in marketing, it is good if they attend broader marketing department meetings. This lets them get to know marketing stakeholders and understand their needs and priorities.
While their marketing counterparts assist with translating business needs into user stories and similar documentation, IT martech practitioners can bring a technical perspective to martech projects. They should help marketing stakeholders understand the architecture of the martech and overall organizational stack.
They need to help marketers understand data flows, cadence of integrations and technical limitations. Since marketing tends to make the ultimate decisions, IT martech practitioners should help marketing stakeholders understand the pros and cons of decisions. That way, they can make informed decisions that sometimes involve tech debt or less-than-optimal configurations, which are at times justified due to the level of effort, timing and prioritization.
Dig deeper: How marketers can reinvent the IT-marketing dynamics
Martech’s integration with product teams
Where a product team or department exists, martech practitioners can also offer marketing and IT with valuable services.
Product martech practitioners can play central roles in evaluating potential solutions and platforms that marketing and IT are considering. They work with marketing to get its business requirements and KPIs and with IT to identify solutions that fit well into the existing tech stack. Such work can include understanding tradeoffs of buy vs. build decisions and longer-term needs like technical support and user enablement.
Product teams are also great candidates to help lead projects since they regularly interact with involved parties. They are in a great position to help provide longer-term perspectives to projects. In many cases projects can span many different platforms just as there are sometimes many concurrent projects involving a platform.
Martech practitioners can join a product team from different backgrounds. For instance, working in marketing or IT can lead to such a team. Bringing different backgrounds together has a lot of potential, but it is critical to understand what each person brings to the table. Don’t, for example, expect a former paid search marketing specialist to understand JSON.
Dig deeper: Understanding different product roles in marketing technology acquisition
The evolving role of martech practitioners across organizations
Martech inherently sits at the intersection of multiple disciplines, which is why martech practitioners are found in many different parts of the org chart. As technology advances and becomes more accessible, the tools and platforms once considered part of martech are increasingly becoming a natural extension of marketing itself.
These dynamics are part of what makes martech such an interesting career path.
Dig deeper: Role of a marketing technology manager: Best of the MarTechBot
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