If you found this page and are not sure what it is and why it’s here, go read this post – I created this during my interview process with Rubrik for a Technical Marketing Manager position. As well, see the bottom for a link to apply to join the team.

When I grow up, can I be a Marketeer?

• We are what children who love technology dream of growing up to be – even if they don’t know that we exist.
• We are those who love technology so much that we’ve been pulled despite our best efforts into the language of outcomes, marketing, and customer reach. Metrics are not to be feared but rather to be shaped and embraced.
• We live in a world of politics but refuse to play politics. We seek to “elevate the league” recognizing that someone on today’s “opposing team” may be a future “team mate”. (Analogy credit to Chad)
• We love our technical brethren – presales, post sales, product management, engineers, customers – and stand at the intersection between them and our nontechnical brethren – customers, business executives, sales, marketing. Our vocabulary is mixed parts business and technology to remain audience relevant.
• We inhale information constantly, synthesize, and adaptively single cast or multicast with the appropriate audience in mind. When worthwhile, we even revel in a Hegelian “thesis + anthithesis = synthesis” dialectic with zero ego.

Marketing isn’t a dirty word when done right.

As technical folks, we’re often raised to despise people in marketing (much less people in sales). It doesn’t need to be that way.

If you have a need, how grateful are you to someone who truly understands your need and offers a solution? Marketing, sales, presales, technical or not – that person is a godsend.

We believe that technical marketing can be done in a way that is truly worthwhile for our peers, our company, and our customers.

Focus on customer needs, what we can provide, and the intersection of that – no need to snipe at the competition.

Enough with the pompous language…what’s the job?

On any given day, it could be partly or wholly field CTO, office of the CTO, practice manager, product manager, technical marketing, evangelist, presales technical, etc.

At its core, you must know Rubrik inside and out – do you need to be able to commit code? Not necessarily…but you should know every feature and its impact at multiple levels. If you can see the product screens and API capabilities on the back of your eyelids, you’re getting there. All joking aside, you should have the ability to learn Rubrik inside and out at multiple levels – administrative/operational, engineering, architecture, features, business impact, architecture, etc.

If we break that down into daily activities, it could look like…

• Create content either individually or as part of a team. This could be blogs, PowerPoint, sales training, presales training. Own the creation of technical content such as technical white papers, technical references, solutions walkthroughs and more.
• Work with marketing around webinar topics + which ones are worthwhile.
• Speak at user groups, conferences, etc. – wherever there’s a worthwhile audience relative to the time investment. Yes, that judgment call will often be yours.
• Take customer conversations, track trends, and work with product management on upcoming feature importance. This might involve reprioritization of existing features or new features. The goal here is to be capable enough to have an opinion/be a filter but also with humility.
• Meet with larger customers around critical deals.
• Recraft existing messaging to be effective to new audiences – if needed, create new messaging.
• Help align internal teams (marketing, development, etc.) to teams in the field (sales, presales, etc.).

This list isn’t nearly long enough to be honest but at the same time will require someone with strong initiative + ability to prioritize — it’s too much for a single person after all. What do you think you could bring that’s not on this list?

If you’re seeing this blog post in March 2018, we’re currently hiring for this role – apply here if interested.