Observations
How Marketing Can Explain APIs and Modules Without Involving the CTO
As a marketing director in an IT company, you face one fundamental paradox. Your strongest source of credible content is the expertise of your CTO and senior engineers. However, they are also your busiest and least accessible resources.
As a result, producing in-depth technical content is difficult. Every article requires multiple meetings with an architect. Every white paper gets stuck in the approval process for months. Your entire content plan depends on the schedules of a few people, and you constantly find yourself playing the role of supplicant, pulling key employees away from their core work.
Hiring “one more copywriter” will not solve this problem. It requires a change in approach. Stop treating your CTO as a real-time database that you “query” for every task. Instead, perform one core dump—a complete extraction of fundamental knowledge—and build a self-sufficient content system on top of it.
This article breaks down a step-by-step process for building such a “content assembly line.” This three-step methodology enables you to “clone” the expertise of your technical leaders, reduce your dependency on their time by 80%, and ensure the consistent production of high-quality technical content.
Step 1: The “Knowledge Extraction Session”
This step is the most important. You need to convince your CTO of the value of a single, in-depth working session that lasts 2–3 hours. This is not “just another meeting.” The goal is not to discuss specific articles, but rather to establish the fundamental “source code” for all future technical communication.
Preparation is essential. Marketers should arrive with a list of well-prepared open-ended questions. The key is to get the CTO and engineers talking about principles and decisions, not features.
Here are some examples of such questions:
- Architecture and Philosophy Questions: “Please draw a simplified diagram of our architecture. What three core principles did you embed into it?”, “What is the most non-obvious yet brilliant technical solution in our product?”, “If our product were a car, what would it be, and why?“
- Competitor questions: “What is our main competitor doing fundamentally wrong on a technical level, in your opinion?”, “Which problem do we solve ten times better because of our architecture?“
- Future-oriented questions: “Where is our architecture heading in the next two years?”, “Which market technical pain are we planning to address next?“
The entire session must be recorded on video and transcribed. The output is a priceless artifact: 20–30 pages of raw, authentic, firsthand expertise. This is the “ore” from which we’ll extract the “gold” — your internal wiki and content assets — in the next steps.
This is the most efficient way to extract knowledge. One session can provide a year’s worth of ideas and facts, serving as the foundation for all future systematic work.
Step 2: Create the internal product wiki
The next step is to transform the collected information into an organized, user-friendly resource. We call this asset the internal product wiki.
It is your single source of truth and is stored in Confluence or Notion. Before asking the CTO anything, any employee (marketer, salesperson, newcomer) should check this wiki.
What should be included?
- Glossary: An approved dictionary of terminology aligned with the CTO. How should we name our modules? Which analogies are acceptable, and which are not?
- Architecture diagrams: Simplified diagrams annotated in plain language and derived from the knowledge extraction session.
- Feature-Value Matrix: The most important section. It is a table in which every key technical capability (e.g., “asynchronous task processing”) is translated into business benefits (“the interface does not freeze while generating reports”).
You now have a “cache” of your CTO’s expertise that can be reused indefinitely.
Step 3: Launch the Content Conveyor
Now, when a copywriter is tasked with writing an article about security, they don’t consult the CTO; rather, they refer to an “internal Wikipedia” and base 90% of the text on it. They send the finished draft to an expert engineer with the question, “Is everything here technically correct?” rather than “Tell me about this.”
This technical review takes only 15–20 minutes, rather than two hours of explaining from scratch. This process reduces engineer involvement in content creation by 80–90%. Engineers stop being authors and become quality controllers. Content production shifts from unpredictable “creativity” to a controlled workflow.
Moving from Chaos to System
Constantly distracting the CTO with marketing tasks is not a scalable strategy. It leads to burnout and slows down development. The only way to avoid these issues is to build a system that “clones” the CTO’s knowledge and makes it available to the entire company.
A CMO in a tech company should be an architect of a knowledge management system, not just a creative leader. This creates an asset that increases not only marketing efficiency, but also sales, support, and new employee onboarding efficiency.
This three-step process is the foundation for scaling your technical marketing. Save this article to your corporate knowledge base and use it as the agenda for your first “knowledge extraction session” with your CTO. One meeting can save you hundreds of hours in the future.
