The MarTech Developer - Sanford Whiteman

Sanford (“Sandy”) Whiteman is a legend in the Marketo world.

A software developer by trade, he’s one of a small handful of engineers who have focused specifically on marketing platforms and problems - not merely as a one-time project or side interest but as a dedicated speciality.

Sandy is the #1 all-time contributor in the Marketo product community with over 23,500 posts and an honorary community moderator designation.

He's also been a great friend and teacher to me over the years and a collaborator on many projects.

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About Today's Guest

Sanford Whiteman is Chief Technologist at FigureOne, a Marketo development agency.

Key Topics

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:05] - Sandy’s background and how he entered the Marketo world. His start as an IT security person. Developing an app for the textbook publishing industry. First Marketo project: to fix Munchkin. Reverse engineering the Munchkin script. Developing fluency in the Marketo UI.
• [04:58] - Why Sandy took the Munchkin script seriously. Enjoyment of niche knowledge and desire to discover what is currently unknown. Previous experience reverse engineering Microsoft SMTP server. People even at Marketo/Adobe not fully understanding the product internals. They are not front-end people.
• [08:17] - Justin’s perspective on when Sandy entered the Marketo community. People guessing or speculating at how things worked technically but without a technical background. The contrast when a real developer focused on the same topics. Sandy’s desire to not guess and to spread accurate knowledge about systems. How early developers scoffed at cloud-based systems and refused to support them. How developer skepticism towards MarTech systems may be rooted in a resentment from the IT team. IT questioning why the company would pay for a system they believe (erroneously) could be built in-house.
• [11:49] - Why “mainstream” developers who are otherwise talented produce bad work in the MarTech world (e.g., poor integrations) and show a lack of curiosity about it. Disparagement of marketing within the developer community. Lack of understanding of core components of marketing automation: SMTP, landing pages, databases. Belief that these are unsophisticated technology. Internal IT resources haven’t had to manage email servers for 15 years or more. That knowledge has died out, leading to lack of understanding. Perceived primacy of back-end developers over front-end developers. Disparagement of JavaScript.
• [20:49] - The rationale for investing hours of time investigating obscure issues. How mastery of obscure knowledge becomes useful when those situations do arise.
• [24:32] - The challenge of being a technical consultant to marketers: you’re downstream of strategy. Discussion of how it feels to work on marketing projects where the strategy is flawed or creative seems ineffective. The political challenges of giving feedback as a consultant. Sandy’s frustrating situation with a client claiming the Marketo Lead ID is PII. How there’s also a prestige that can come with being a consultant.
• [32:19] - Sanford’s perspective on the product outlook of Marketo and whether the glory days of the platform are behind it. Lack of innovation in recent times. If Sandy was in charge, he would shut down imitation / look-alike products (Adobe Connect, Live Chat) as these won’t successfully replace more full-featured applications.
• [33:42] - Sandy and Justin build a fantasy roadmap for Marketo. The importance of getting ahead of the market and deeply understanding the needs of the customer. Questioning whether anyone at Adobe is filling that role now with respect to Marketo. Lack of focus on effective marketing. Smaller companies with dynamic founders seem more likely to come up with these ideas.
• [35:55] - Feature idea: ability to customize the UI in Marketo (like a Visualforce page in Salesforce). The challenge of rebuilding an existing app interface using legacy technology. Why Sky failed.
• [41:59] - Feature idea: ability to analyze records in the database in relation to each other. (E.g., create quartiles.) Discussion of new Activity Stream feature (outbound streaming API).
• [45:52] - Feature idea: better data manipulation within flow steps (like what is possible to do in FlowBoost).
• [46:33] - Feature idea: more control over order of operations within the system. Guaranteed ways to avoid race conditions. Question of whether this is solvable within marketing automation architecture. The ability to have visibility of database changes yet to be committed. How Marketo provides a toolkit that requires developer-esque conceptual understanding.
• [51:13] - Discussion of AI and its potential impact on marketing technology. One potential application is using it to generate documentation. AI beneficial as a convenience tool (like the computer on a Star Trek ship). Justin expresses skepticism about its generative abilities for marketing content. Challenges for AI with generating or explaining humour.

Resource Links

• TEKNKL :: Blog - Sanford’s blog. A critical resource for the Marketo developer.
• FlowBoost for Marketo - Sanford’s app providing additional data processing capabilities for Marketo.
• Data Streams - Marketo Developers - Documentation for the “Data Streams” functionality discussed during the show.

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