Marketers Are Shipping Code Now
Stop writing Jira tickets, start shipping!
Every marketer should now be able to vibe code website changes, performance dashboards, data transformations. Or they should at least be learning how.
I’m seeing it every day at Lovable. Yesterday a PMM in the team shipped a new home page iteration, whilst another marketer updated the LTV we’re passing to ad platforms.
The aha moment was when I saw one of the team vibe code a bug fix using our slack bot. This is the democratisation of skills that only 1% of humans previously had and it’s leading to an evolution in what Marketing teams are capable of.
My network suggests most marketing teams aren’t doing this yet so the faster you move, the bigger your advantage. Here’s how I think about it:
There are three broad capabilities that used to require high skill or a SaaS tool, but are now becoming democratised through AI:
Engineering - 80% of building and deploying functional apps, data engineering, and automations no longer requires coding experience if your team is setup correctly. Natural language is becoming the new programming language.
Analytics - Building dashboards, diagnosing data issues in your database, developing MMM & conversion lift tools, creating custom attribution. If your BI tool isn’t enabling this already, I’d recommend pushing your data team for change.
Creative Production - Generating video or static ads, writing copy at scale and building email templates no longer requires an agency or a full creative team. AI tools enable production from those not deeply skilled in creative production.
You’ll need support getting the initial setup in place and to build guardrails for each of these areas, but this is a small short term piece of work to make your team considerably more productive.
Teams will operate differently going forward
I used to only hire growth marketers who could write SQL, but this is outdated, you don’t need to write SQL, or any other coding language any more. If you understand the foundations and are competent at prompting, you’ll unlock what I’ve shared above.
The highest leverage action I believe most marketing leaders can take today is working with data, engineering and creative teams to unblock high performers in their team from being able to do what previously required deep skills. Then to lead by example, start actioning improvements yourself rather than waiting for engineering, data, creative teams.
We’re in the beginning of how marketing teams will operate going forward, a restructuring of what they look like and who can do what within them. I expect this will continue to evolve in the next 6 months, out-dating this article, but if you aren’t already taking action then catching up is become increasingly difficult.
Move fast but set guardrails
For the time being, it’s important that the above is implemented with guardrails in place. You don’t want changes being made to the website by marketers without PR’s being reviewed, similarly, you might not want a performance marketer to ship a new variation of an ad without creative review.
You can put guardrails in place, but you should actively try to automate as many of these as you can. Run through an AI checklist on any ads before you ship, build an AI bot that reviews email HTML before it’s sent to your email marketer etc.
Examples of what I’m seeing that has driven this perspective
Here are just a few examples of what I’m seeing day in, day out from members of my team without technical support that should give some depth to my point of view, all these things have been done by non-technical marketers:
1. Vibe coding new pages and edits on our website
2. Building compliance bots for ad creative
3. Integrate conversion API’s for new ad platforms
4. Create new dashboards for marketing with SQL
5. Generating viral video content with AI
The future is one where marketers ship, don’t get left behind