I recently started learning bass because I wanted to write some songs and fill out arrangements beyond what I could manage on guitar. The instruments seemed similar enough that I thought my skills would translate.
Some did. But knowing how to play was different from knowing what to play. Fumbling my way through bass, I started hearing places where I’d been adding more guitar when the arrangement needed bass. I became more conscious of where my part could make room for other parts and make the whole song better. More than anything, learning bass made me a better guitar player.
That experience came to mind when reading about the growth of “marketing engineers”—marketers who use AI to build tools, automate workflows, and connect systems.
I see examples of that in how my marketing teams work every day. My teams are connecting information, testing ideas, and making things that would previously have required a much longer conversation about resources.
But, building an entire system yourself shouldn’t be the destination. The opportunity is to sharpen what you bring and learn where to make room for what others do best. That’s why the “marketing engineer” title irked me. Does a marketer who builds things become an engineer? And marketing done well is already rigorous enough. Does a marketer that builds really need a different title?
Good marketing brings discipline to segmentation, positioning, and experimentation. Good engineering brings reliability, maintainability, and scalability—the demands a working vibe-coded prototype can easily leave unresolved. Building across those disciplines helps each appreciate the other’s expertise and put it to better use together.
What you learn from building
I’d encourage every marketer to tinker and build. Curiosity is core to being good at this job. You wonder why something happens, see a connection others haven’t made, and find a way to test whether there’s anything to it. AI gives more of that curiosity somewhere to go.
In the Journal’s article, my former Google colleague Marvin Chow makes the case for hiring “builder-strategists.” I agree. I want strategy to be pressure tested as early as possible. Sometimes the most useful outcome of building is discovering that an idea needs refinement.
Writing has always been one of the best ways to hone your thinking. An idea can feel fully formed until you try to explain it on the page. You discover a missing connection, an assumption you made but didn’t explain, or a word that better describes what you really mean.
Building a marketing system can do the same thing. You have to specify what information goes in, what should happen next, and what a useful result looks like. The exercise can make you a better marketer before you have anything worth deploying. A prototype can be disposable. The understanding it creates shouldn’t be.
That understanding improves what you ask of others and how you respond to their work.
Imagine building a customer segmentation tool and discovering that marketing counts anyone who purchased in the past year as active, while sales uses the past quarter. A seemingly straightforward request contains a disagreement about the customer. Building exposes it early enough for the teams to resolve it together.
A marketer who has wrestled with an integration can give engineering a more precise brief. Someone who has tried to automate a workflow can give marketing operations more useful feedback. They can recognize a constraint, explain a tradeoff, and see where a colleague’s expertise would improve the approach.
The work also gives those colleagues a clearer view into the marketer’s thinking. A prototype makes assumptions visible: which customer behaviors matter, what the business hopes to change, and why a particular experience might help. Engineers can question those choices, contribute ideas, and propose approaches the marketer wouldn’t have considered.
Building creates the conditions for a better solution together. The goal of an early experiment can be to give everyone a clearer problem to solve, shared information to work from, and a better understanding of what each person brings.
The marketer helps turn that understanding into a shared direction: who we’re trying to reach, what we want to change, and how we’ll know whether it worked. The team can then design the system together, with each person contributing where their strengths matter most.
I picked up bass to fill out arrangements. Learning it has improved what I bring to a song with a guitar in my hands, including knowing when to leave room for someone else.
That’s what I want marketers to bring back from building: sharper thinking, better conversations, and a clearer sense of how their strengths fit with everyone else’s. The lasting value is how much better the team builds together.
