Everyone from ICs to managers and senior leaders are responsible for internal marketing. A good litmus test to evaluate if you’re doing internal marketing well is to ask: does everyone know why the work they’re doing matters?
Executives lay out corporate strategy and middle managers diffuse this into their teams. Often though, something gets lost in translation and teams end up “working” without a clear understanding of the driving purpose behind their work. I think this happens when the distance between what you’re doing day to day and the outcome of that work are too far apart.
For example, engineering might be working on a new product feature to support an upcoming sales deal. Sales deals can take a while and the impact of the new feature is likely to lag by months: sales needs to close the deal, the customer needs to implement the product, and then after that they hopefully see the impact of the new feature engineering delivered.
This feedback loop is too long. Can you imagine hustling for a month or two only to find out months later (or never) that your work mattered? In many cases, engineering ships the feature and moves on and never sees the impact of their work.
Ideally, engineering would work more closely with the customer during feature development and implementation. Seeing customer problems in action can be really motivating!
Often though, timelines aren’t ideal and there’s externalities we can’t control (like the timeline for a customer to purchase and implement new software). Instead, we can lean on internal marketing to bridge the motivation gap.
Internal marketing efforts can be anything from storytelling at an All Hands presentation to organized user research that deeply describes a customer pain-points. Too often though, internal marketing focuses on what executives want to see like revenue, costs, margins, or other bland business metrics. These are okay, but they don’t tell a convincing story to most employees.
Instead, internal marketing should make an impassioned case for the company’s existence and the purpose of the company as it relates to solving customer problems. And most importantly, this is a time for storytelling. Customer quotes, videos, visualizations all help. A slide deck or similar format can help you bring people along.
Lastly, don’t expect everyone to give their life to their job but expect them to understand why their work matters. This starts with you though—iterate on how to effectively communicate why your work matters. Don’t let large swathes of the company drift until the next regularly scheduled reorgs happens.
One of my favorite business quips: executives love to reorg like engineers love to refactor. If you only do internal marketing when you reorg, you’re doing it wrong.