why marketers should learn from developers

Today I spent my day at Ideato, Francesco’s company in Cesena.

In the past I used to visit Ideato more often but since I moved to Vienna it happens less frequently. Many of the things that make my life better are coming from this company and from the friendship with Francesco, that is very valuable to me.

During my past visits at Ideato I learned about the Pomodoro tecnique, pair programming and TDD.

I’m a marketing manager, in the past I was a developer and I’ve always danced on the line between nerditude and geekyness so there’s something I can tell for sure: good developers are productive.

I’ve always found extremely positive to carefully observe their way to complete tasks and I try to introduce their techniques in my workflow. The results hava always been excellent: the pomodoro tecnique is widely used at my work place during meetings and design sessions, and it’s a daily tool at Calypso12.

Innovation comes from diversity and the contribution I give to my business partners and clients comes from the ability of converting many of my background expertise into different activities.

my new power tools

Today I took great learnings from Francesco. I will get back to Vienna with two new power tools: markdown and git. Let’s see how this two new (to me) things can fit into my busy world.

I’m totally in love with markdown because I’m a pure text guy. I hate how people tend to produce a Word file for everything. Pure text is good enough for 99% of the normal office work but people tend to use Word because it looks easier. Then they spend most of their time solving issues during the conversion from Word to PDF, or dealing with the different .DOC versions available.

My goal for the next few months will be to strongly introduce Markdown within my company. It will be a bit difficult at the very beginning but I work with smart people and I know they will love it soon as well. Let’s see how it goes.

one last thing…

yes, I wrote this post in markdown and then converted into HTML with a click: it’s awesome, you should try it too!