How to Outcompete with Performance Marketing
A Case for Growth Engineering
In every company I’ve worked for, there has always been a disconnect between product engineering and marketing. For most engineers working on the product, requests from the marketing team feel like a burden. From time to time, they ask to add another tracker to the website — we do it, and move on. No one checks how it performs or what the data quality looks like.
Sometimes, it’s even worse — three departments get involved. Engineers add tracking, data teams try to make sense of the data and send it into marketing tools, and then, somehow, we end up with completely different numbers across platforms. One conversion count in Amplitude or Mixpanel, and a completely different one in the ad platforms.
It’s fascinating, considering how much companies today rely on performance marketing — and how complex it’s become with all the tracking restrictions. You have MMPs, Conversion APIs, SDKs, and pixels, yet most companies still operate in silos.
After having a completely different experience at Speechify and seeing what’s possible, I want to make a case for growth engineering. You need engineers to build great products — and you also need engineers to bring in and monetize users. These engineers should operate at the same level of seniority as product engineers. It’s a full-time job, sometimes even for several people.
Why not just rely on data people? Because only engineers who work with the product or onboarding know what data they send and how it’s structured. If you add another layer — like a data analyst — ownership gets lost, and everything slows down. Analysts find issues in analytics, reach out to engineers, explain and validate problems, wait for prioritization, then for release. Rinsing and repeating. It’s inefficient — especially in performance marketing, where speed matters.
For this role, you need someone who can own the entire process end to end — implement the events in the app, set up data pipelines, and validate results in marketing platforms. Most likely, they’ll need to repeat the process several times before the data becomes fully reliable. They need to be comfortable reading confusing ad platform documentation, finding workarounds for half-broken integrations, and debugging dashboards that never seem to work as expected.
Once you have someone with an engineering mindset inside marketing — someone who treats it as their main responsibility instead of a side task — things start to change. Data becomes reliable. Conversions start to match. New integration methods are discovered. Automation improves. Over time, you begin to outcompete others simply because things work.
And if that person needs support from product or backend teams, it happens faster — engineer-to-engineer communication is just more efficient.
And that’s only the start. With proper engineering in marketing, you can build better experimentation tools, support localization, and unlock many other growth opportunities.
The hardest part is finding an engineer who genuinely cares about the company’s revenue — and wants to help it grow.
This is how different departments operate.