Martech practitioners operate at the intersection of marketing and technology. So, they can be placed in different places on a flowchart.
Their position in the organization affects their responsibilities and associated responsibilities. martech job description. Understanding this also helps training a martech team.
Where martech fits into the organization
As a Martech practitioner, I have worked in marketing, IT and on a product team. It has been interesting to observe how this has affected my role. Although it didn’t have as much impact as the situation with my employer and the competition, it still significantly influenced my work.
Tools that were once highly specialized are commonplace in many departments. This is particularly visible in martech, where IT is increasingly integrated into marketing and other areas. This trend will likely expand as technology advances, blurring the lines between departments and influencing the way martech practitioners work within organizations.
Furthermore, determine if a platform or system is martech may depend on several factors. These factors, in turn, influence how martech is managed within an organization. Let us also not forget the nuances that the RevOps And customer operations perspectives bring to the table.
Some companies now have sales 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 ultimately just be marketing.
Thus, a martech practitioner’s position in an organizational chart may have less influence on their role than in the past. It’s interesting to compare what it means to report to long-time marketers, former programmers, and business architects.
These are generalizations: divisions of labor and responsibilities vary from one organization to another.
The role of Martech in marketing
When martech practitioners work in marketing, they are naturally close to marketers – the ultimate stakeholders in martech projects. However, regardless of where martech practitioners are located, they need to stay in sync with marketers. This will require more effort from those outside of marketing.
In many cases, they are the main link between marketing and IT. They can attend regular meetings (like a daily scrum) with IT staff assigned to marketing projects. So they likely need to answer questions from IT about requirements, KPIs, and prioritization.
Additionally, they can help translate marketing business needs into user stories and tickets. This way, they can specialize in translating business needs into IT needs, allowing other marketers to focus on what they are primarily responsible for, such as creative teams who focus on creating collateral (digital or other).
Sometimes they partner with IT teams to help achieve marketing’s IT priorities. A few examples help business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), user audits of core organizational systems and assessment and elimination of technology debt.
Since martech practitioners who work in marketing are close to the stakeholders who fund projects and platforms, they are well positioned to work with purchasing start, renewal and termination of contracts. They can also help with coordination between IT and legal stakeholders, as they have information security and regulatory assessments to conduct.
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The role of martech in IT
Martech practitioners who work in IT are likely key liaisons to marketing. In addition to attending regular meetings with their marketing martech counterparts, it is good for them to attend broader marketing department meetings. This allows them to know the marketing players and understand their needs and priorities.
While their marketing counterparts help translate business needs into user stories and similar documentation, martech IT practitioners can bring a technical perspective to martech projects. They should help marketing stakeholders understand the martech architecture and overall organizational stack.
They should help marketers understand data flows, the cadence of integrations, and technical limitations. Since marketing tends to make the final decisions, IT martech practitioners must help marketing stakeholders understand the pros and cons of decisions. This way, they can make informed decisions that sometimes involve technology debt or less than optimal configurations, which are sometimes justified due to level of effort, timing, and prioritization.
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Integration of Martech with product teams
When there is a product team or department, martech practitioners can also offer valuable marketing and IT services.
Product Martech practitioners can play a central role in evaluating potential solutions and platforms being considered by Marketing and IT. They work with Marketing to learn its business requirements and KPIs, and with IT to identify solutions that fit well into the existing technology stack. Such work may include understanding the tradeoffs between buy and build decisions and long-term needs such as technical support and user enablement.
Product teams are also great candidates to help lead projects because they interact regularly with the parties involved. They are well placed to help provide longer-term perspectives for projects. In many cases, projects can span several different platforms, just as there are sometimes many concurrent projects involving one platform.
Martech practitioners can join a product team from different backgrounds. For example, working in marketing or IT may lead to such a team. Bringing different backgrounds together has a lot of potential, but understanding what each person brings to the table is key. Don’t expect, for example, a former paid search marketer to understand JSON.
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The evolving role of martech practitioners in organizations
Martech inherently sits at the intersection of several disciplines, which is why Martech practitioners are found in many different parts of the flowchart. As technology advances and becomes more accessible, tools and platforms once considered part of martech are increasingly becoming a natural extension of marketing itself.
This dynamic is part of what makes martech such an interesting career path.
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