Observations
Marketing that doesn’t understand your product’s architecture is harmful. Why is the CTO your best “salesperson”?
Marketing that doesn’t understand the fundamentals of your product’s architecture isn’t just useless; it’s harmful. This harm appears in two forms. The first and most obvious form occurs when marketing promises something that does not exist in the product, chasing catchy slogans. For example, marketing promises “instant analytics” when your architecture is designed for hourly data updates. This leads to disappointed clients and an overloaded support team.
The second form of harm is more subtle but no less dangerous. It occurs when marketing ignores the real “gold”—the elegant and powerful architectural decisions you are proud of—and tries to sell the product based on secondary attributes, such as “a user-friendly interface.” As a result, your strongest advantages remain in the shadows.
The issue here is not the age-old conflict between “technical” and “non-technical” minds. The issue is a broken process. When marketing a complex product, the most important step is an in-depth interview with the technical team, not competitor analysis or customer surveys.
In this article, we will break down the two types of harm and propose a collaboration model in which marketing becomes your strongest ally in communicating your product’s true value to the market.
Harm #1: Selling a Product That Doesn’t Exist (and Angry Clients)
Although this type of harm stems from good intentions, it leads to negative outcomes. Marketers want to find the most powerful and attractive message. Without a deep technical understanding, they might take an internal term or concept and “enhance” it into an inaccurate, yet bold, market promise.
For example, the IT team might build a flexible API that allows integration with various systems. The marketing team hears about it and launches a campaign with the slogan, “Instant integration with any of your software in one click!”
What happens next? Clients arrive with false expectations, get disappointed quickly, and churn during onboarding. The support team is flooded with complaints, and engineers waste time resolving issues instead of developing product improvements. The final touch? Public negative reviews damage the reputation of a good product.
The damage from this type of marketing goes far beyond wasted budget. It actively destroys the value created by your team’s hard work.
Harm #2: Ignoring the “Gold” Under Your Feet
This is the other side of the coin, which is equally destructive. Rather than creating something that doesn’t exist, marketing fails to recognize or understand the product’s real, key advantages.
Why? True technological breakthroughs are often “under the hood.” They are difficult to describe in a few words and impossible to demonstrate with a flashy visual. It’s much easier to emphasize simple, surface-level benefits like “user-friendly interface” or “stylish design.”
Imagine your team spent a year building a unique, multi-tenant architecture that delivers top-tier data isolation and security for large enterprise clients. This is your core competitive advantage. However, the marketing team fails to understand it and launches a campaign with the message: “Our service helps small businesses organize their tasks!” They’re selling your sophisticated, powerful product as if it were a simple task manager. They show screenshots of polished buttons but don’t mention security or data isolation.
What does this lead to? A wave of small business leads who don’t need—and won’t pay for—your complex architecture. Meanwhile, enterprise clients who would gladly pay a premium for security and reliability never even see your offer. The company allocates engineering and support resources to the wrong audience while ideal clients choose competitors who communicate their value more effectively, even if it’s weaker.
By ignoring the technical core, marketing doesn’t just miss an opportunity; it sends the entire company down the wrong path, leading to stagnation and frustration.
Solution: CTO as the Main Source of Truth for Marketing.
How can you avoid selling something that doesn’t exist or ignoring a product’s real strengths? The answer is to build a process where marketing is grounded in technical truth. The main carrier of that truth in the company is the technical team.
Work on any new marketing message should begin with a deep interview between the marketer and the CTO and lead developers, not with a “creative brainstorming session.” The marketer should approach them with the right questions, not ready-made ideas.
Rather than asking, “What are our features?” a good marketer would ask, “What architectural decision made this year do you consider the most important, and why?” This question helps uncover the “gold under your feet.”
Rather than asking, “How are we better than our competitors?” they will ask, “What does our product do differently at a fundamental level that allows us to solve client problems more effectively?” Finally, they will ask the key positioning question: “For what type of clients is our architecture an ideal solution, and for what type is it excessive or too complex?”
The answers to these questions form the “technical specification” for marketing. In this model, the CTO is not a passive observer but a core participant and guarantor of truthful and accurate marketing communication. Rather than fixing marketing errors after launch, the CTO will guide the messaging process from day one.
Marketing as your product’s public API
A technically flawless product has a powerful, yet closed, core. In order for the external world (the market) to interact with it effectively, it needs a clear, stable, and well-documented interface. Simply showing the code or describing the technology stack is not enough.
In this sense, systematic marketing becomes the public API for your product. It takes the complex internal logic (features, architecture, and security protocols) and presents a set of simple, understandable “endpoints”: value propositions, case studies, ROI calculations, and webinars. Business users interact with these endpoints to make purchase decisions. They don’t need to know what happens under the hood.
If you feel your product is “undervalued” by the market, the issue might not be the product itself, but rather the quality of its public API.
