Engineers build valuable side projects while focused on big launches, but marketing and sales never see them. The speaker proposes hiring an "engineering locksmith" to find and extract these hidden assets, letting other teams deliver quick wins without waiting for polished products.
Tech companies should have engineering locksmiths. I talk with a lot of tech entrepreneurs and tech companies. I keep running into this phenomenon where like marketers stay in their lane. They're supposed to— they're marketing, they're selling whatever these engineers come up with. And the engineers keep on trying to work on something big that is worthy of their time and their attention. In the meantime, if you look a little more closely, there's like all this value that's being created along the way. And then often there's like the engineers trying to trying to retain control over those assets, trying to keep them from being delivered directly to the customer or what have you. When you look at that, wow, I know how that would solve a customer's problem and it's just not being revealed. So I talk about the engineer locksmith to unlock the latent value that's sitting inside engineering, the things that could be done a lot more quickly that might not be quote unquote worthy of core engineering, but they create a whole lot of value that then marketing and sales and customer success could bring to bear. Ask yourself how you can do that which is easy to deliver a lot of value.
