Raaz Herzberg, CMO and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, explains why marketing allows for much more aggressive experimentation and risk-taking than product development.
“If you decide to build a feature in a product, then A, you're taking engineering time, which is the most valuable resource in every company, in my opinion, and B, in some ways, you can never take it back. Like it's complicated your product. Even if one customer likes it and uses it, at least it'd be to be, you're never going to be able to like suddenly take it away. And every new product you add to your product will like every new feature you add to your product, you will have to think about, okay, how does it work with that feature? So it's like making a mistake, like adding something to the product that is not the right thing, or that is not truly, truly what your customer needed, even if it's what they asked for, but if it's not what they truly needed, it has a huge cost, like a huge cost associated with it. Marketing is quite the opposite in my opinion. There's no cost to anything, no maintenance to anything, no technical depth, no anything. Like, if tomorrow I post a video on Wiz's LinkedIn page, and I think that video is super funny, and nobody likes that video, nothing happened. Tomorrow I'll post a different video, no maintenance, bye-bye, forgot it ever happened.”
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