Tony Fadell argues founders should integrate marketing with product development from the very start. Engineers and designers often build interesting 'what' features without articulating the 'why,' which leads to marketing stories that don't match the product. Fadell recommends writing a product "treatment" or press release early (audience, pain, features, price) and using it as a measuring stick during development so marketing and product stay aligned.
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And let me give you. I'm going to give you a couple of different ways of looking at it. Okay? And it again, we're going to. Might go a little long here, so just stay tuned in. Yeah, so the first thing is start at the beginning. Let's start at the beginning. In the early part of my career, you know, like General Magic and Phillips and what have you, and especially when I was, you know, a teenager, when I was like doing. Making my own chips and stuff like that, I really worried about just putting cool things together. I'm like that when I put those two cool things together as an engineer, you go, that's cool. And then I would talk to the other friends who might be geeks too, and they go, yeah, that's cool. Because we knew the bits, so we put them together and that's a new way of doing it. You're like, wow, that's all. What. It's not. Why. Why are you doing this? We know what we're doing, but we don't know why we're doing it. Because we're not articulating it for ourselves. Because it's just something. We're like, putting it together. Like. Yeah, that's cool. Because. Because we think we're solving some problem we have, but we're not really articulating it. So what normally happens? And this happens because we invest in so many companies around the world. You have these brilliant engineers, designers, scientists, researchers. They put together these. These what's. And then they develop it, develop it, develop it. And then at the end, they call in marketing and say, now tell a story about this and let's get it out to the world. Okay, what happens then is marketing's like, well, why do. Why do people need this? Tell us why people need it. And so they create a story around this product, but the product was born out of what's not wise. And so they start telling. Marketing starts telling a story and it turns out to be a fictional story. Usually they say, oh, this is going to do these things. The product comes in, is delivered, and it falls flat on its face because the marketing doesn't match the product. Because they weren't both created at the beginning together. Right. There are what's. When you create a product, but there's a lot more whys. And the wise help inform the what's, and the whys also inform the marketing.
So at the. At the. That's what you mean? Deeply at. We should start at the beginning. So the designer should be also the marketer, the engineer should be the marketer Exactly.
Stop impressing the geek next to you. What is the superpower you're bringing or the pain you're killing for? The. Your. Your. The end customer right now. Let's get, let's contrast that. Think about a movie. A movie starts with a treatment. It has an audience. This has the audience. Here's the characters, here's the storyline, the plot, here's the, here's the, here's the arc of the story, right? It pulls that all out. Then there's a script that's written and that script is then produced. And then you add all the flourishes and what have you. Music and graphics and what have you, right? And then it comes out and then there's the marketing of the movie. And that story was created at the beginning. What you need to do if you're going to do a great product is create that treatment for your product. And I call that the press release. Do the press release like the treatment? Who's the audience? What features do you have? What pains are you solving for? People have the virus of doubt there to remind them what pains they have and why you're solving them. The price, all of those things. And you use that as the bar, the measuring stick for what you do during development. Because what happens that along the route? You know this. Oh, we're not gonna be able to get that feature done on time. Throw that one overboard. We gotta hit the, we have to hit the date. Oh, we're not sure this product's right yet. Add another feature. Add another feature. Creep, right? If you don't have that story, you know you're going to tell at the beginning, you don't have that bar, right? And then at the end, you don't know when you're done if you don't have that story. So you can actually look at that press release, you might mod, you know, you change it over time, that draft. But then when you're done, you know the what's and the whys, you have all the things, the audience and everything. And then you can give that to marketing and say, well, and marketing has been along the way, let's be clear. But then everybody's in sync and that's when you can tell a cohesive non fictional story about and the product delivers on that story or hopefully over delivers on that story.
