Software Development Gave Me An Amazing Career Path

And I will show you how it can do the same for you

Although I get my fair share of questions on the shifting role of a CMO, the changes in digital marketing and automation, the role of content marketing, and the hype cycle in influencer marketing, and though I speak about these topics at conferences and on podcasts quite regularly, the question “How does a software developer end up as the CMO of one of the largest pure e-commerce companies in Europe?” stopped me in my tracks when an old colleague of mine asked me just that a few weeks ago.

So, I thought it would make sense to devote my maiden post on Medium to answer exactly the question that has kept me up at night.

Starting from software development

I studied applied IT roughly 20 years ago and thus started a career in software development (.NET ecosystem for those wondering), growing in the typical paths within corporate environments. I went from junior over medior to lead developer, scrum master, and software factory satellite lead in the course of a few years. Technically, I shifted towards the development of the underlying platforms and frameworks, created software factory hubs, and worked abroad for four years to build and hone those skills. Looking back now, we did seem to be onto something. We combined scrum with extreme programming, design patterns, unit testing, continuous integration, daily heartbeats, and retrospectives. They all fitted into our neat little setup and seemed to work well for our relatively small (60+ devs in four countries) team while we worked on all non-critical systems a bank insurance group needs. So what made me transition out of software development? A crisis, which I often see as an opportunity when faced with one.

The Polish satellite I was building at the time was sold, together with the other company entities in that country due to the unfolding financial crisis in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse. So, all of a sudden, I had an option to go back to my former team and polish the software framework some more or actually venture out into something new. I chose the latter.

During my period in software development I honed three skills that still pay dividends today.

1. Keep an ever-learning mindset. When you start in software development you know you will be faced with an ever-changing landscape of tools, IDEs, and frameworks. So you know you will be investing a lot of your off-time in studying to keep up with new technology. I would recommend to pick up on material from older technology to see how they did it when all was so much harder to maintain .
2. Lead people that are better than you. At the start of my career, I was asked to lead small teams quite rapidly. This meant leading people with more knowledge and experience. It also led to me finding out early on that it isn’t about a leader’s expertise or them being “the best”, but about a leader being able to guide people positively and making sure their colleagues can do whatever they do best. Combining leading more senior developers with all the cultural differences between countries made for a great learning experience. I got some hard lessons early-on regarding leadership ego and insecurity and that made me distinguish guiding people from commanding them. Later, books like Leaders Eat Last and Patrick Lencioni’s books filled in the blanks.
3. Combine analytics and processes with pattern recognition. As a software developer you are asked to deep-dive into issues, recognize what goes wrong, and solve it with maintainability for the future ingrained into that thought process. Building frameworks meant thinking about how other people would see the product, benefiting from the vision behind it, and making sure you become more efficient when it comes to solving problems that are not new. The latter is always the most difficult one to explain. A good developer is lazy in some sense. Drop the ego, understand that someone probably solved the same issue you have at least once in the last 60 years and spent a bit of time on finding their solution and reasoning behind it instead of blindly coming up with your golden hammer solution.

Transitioned into audit and sales

After coming back from Poland, I found myself basically conflicted between the option of either maintaining a steady state software lead role or looking for a new challenge that would expand my skillset. Even today I will always value the growth of my skillset more than the amount in my next paycheck (or invoice to be correct).

I opted to find a new challenge within the same organization by using part of the MaNaMa curriculum I was doing at the time and shifted from software development to business analysis and information security management. Some parts of my weeks were still spent in at least IT specific technical systems (early days of blue/red team challenges) but I quickly found myself digging into the business side of things. I focused on understanding how executive decisions are made, how products should be positioned, and why some security reports got translated into action plans whilst others merely received an “understood and risk accepted” state. I found myself shifting from development heartbeat meetings to constructing PowerPoint recaps of security reports tailored to the director that would receive it. I learned what made people tick, what made people nervous (enter the principles of FUD) and how constructing the message to convince everyone of the win-win tripled my positive outcomes of studies done.

After the infosec roles, I got the opportunity to take the next steps in the corporate rat race and transition into sales. Within the talent programs of the company it was a matter of ticking the boxes. Being able to become flexible leaders of the future required you to give up on your comfort zone often and that, in hindsight, was a blessing.
So, after finishing up the last rounds of studies and audits I went to a one-year program to become a branch manager in the bank-insurance industry. This was by far my most humbling experience. All of a sudden, I was faced with a field that was as far from my comfort zone as I could have picked. Dealing with clients on a day-to-day basis, working with weekly and monthly sales targets and basically, overnight, becoming the least experienced person in the room, again.

During this period, I studied a lot and found patterns and processes I could recognize and use while guiding my colleagues the same way I did with IT professionals. I gave them all a clear briefing on who I am, what I stand for, and how I try to create a context for all of them to thrive. I made sure to actually be there, not just with the “my door is open” analogy but by removing any separations (flex desk with them rather than separate rooms) and making sure I lived up to the fact that my role existed thanks to them and not the other way around. My operational day-to-day was removing their impediments, my strategical day-to-day was building the organization of the future together with them.

The reason this experience was so humbling was that, unlike in development or analytics, the knowledge needed is not found in books or online fora, it is handed over by colleagues willing to teach you, by colleagues willing to sit next to you and carefully help you craft a skillset while talking to their clients, directly impacting their paycheck while realizing you are supposed to “lead” them. Having the opportunity to work with people that allow you to lead them while they are basically teaching you the basics of what they do is a gift.

From this transition into sales I developed three skills that keep paying dividends as well.

1. Stay humble: I firmly believe that we lead people thanks to those people and not the other way around. I have had the luck to experience different types of teams, team members, and contexts to operate in. All of them led to the same outcome. Remain humble if you want people to help you in guiding them better.
2. Split operational and strategical: When transitioning into sales, it is easy to fall into the productivity trap. Working full days on operational things makes it almost logical to drop the more strategic parts of a leadership role. It is absolutely true that during crisis situations more directing leadership roles can be warranted, and it is also true that sometimes the operational needs surpasses any strategical development, yet I would always advise any leader to split the two. Do what you need to do operationally but set yourself targets to evolve the strategical position of your team, your entity, or even your company.
3. Craft messages: I can’t fully comprehend the impact this has had on my day-to-day results. The notion that the message should be crafted towards an audience is so natural now, yet it took me a long time to learn. Coming from an analytical, fact-based field of expertise branching into executive levels meant I needed to learn how to do this fast.

Landing on managerial and ultimately self-employment

While the first phase in my career took twice the time of the second (ten rather than five years) I did feel that it laid the foundations needed. Always opting to put my skillset before my title or pay-grade made me think about my skillset like an investment strategy; a monthly-ETF-investment strategy to make an analogy. Every month I would spend time on learning new things either through books, MOOCs, school studies, or on the job. I believed that the general market growth would make this a viable strategy to keep on growing. After my sales and branch manager period I actually transitioned into what has become my main skillset today. I was asked to first lead all the digital branches (part of one of the projects that I worked on in those years) and shortly after to become the head of operational marketing and sales of all branches. Enter the 80-hour workweeks, spending nights in PowerPoint iterations, and learning huge amounts on executive reasoning, strategical planning, and digital transformation. During this period, books and courses or on-the-job learning can’t prep you fast enough, so here I learned the power of having a solid network and surrounding yourself with mentors that have your best interest in mind.

1. A solid network means you have people you can reach out to, people that can aid you in understanding situations and problems, or help you contact people far outside your inner circle. They introduce you not only to new people but to new concepts and contexts. They aid you in seeing the bigger picture, show you how the dots are connected, and which wheel in the machine you are turning today and should be turning tomorrow. Building a solid network is something that doesn’t happen overnight; my transitions throughout the company made it happen almost naturally within the company, yet around this milestone I understood what it meant for my development to also nurture a network outside of my employers’ scope. I have made it one of my daily reminders to “pay it forward” as well, functioning as someone that shares his network with people of whom I am convinced mean well.
2. The value of mentors is a source of debate. Some people think they limit the growth of the individual due to the limits of their mindset, but for me they truly opened my eyes. I think most of the confusion stems from the nature of the mentorship relation. In my case I had value from mentorship from people that were more interested in my growth rather than the value that their learnings would bring to the company tomorrow. This ranged from which books to read, listening to my insecurities and sharing theirs, sharing anecdotes on how they approached things, and ultimately focusing on the one question that matters most: “what makes you happy?”

Value your skillset over titles

In the end I finally stopped obsessing over the rat race due to the effect of that ultimate question, “what makes you happy?” I was not happy with the outcome of what I did. The output did not match the input and I felt my skillset was diluted. I spend as many hours on the job as I physically could yet the actual impact we had for clients or for my team was disproportionate. I also started to stumble on the fact that my next step in the hierarchy would lead me in yet another field all together, ultimately prepping me to become a general manager with the risk of never doubling down on a specific expertise or broadening my skillset again.

That stopped me dead in my tracks because that was a deal breaker to me. I value my actual skillset more than a title or prestige. I mean skillset both in terms of soft skills and in expertise. So, the only logical conclusion was to halt the rat race and re-focus on the skillset.

I resigned and became self-employed with the sole purpose of focusing on learning and developing a skillset that I can keep on expanding.

My current tenure as CMO means I do double down on growing my skillset, which is currently dominantly performance marketing, marketing automation, and predictive budgeting (forecasting of trends and analyzing opportunities and risks to build B2C forecasts for example) while enjoying working with and learning from experts in the fields of performance marketing, communication, PR, and brand building. They know what we stand for and focus on how we function together as a big wheel.

I am still grateful for the everyday learning opportunities and try to spend my free time on studying, drawing, stoicism and meditation, and “paying it forward” by aiding start-ups through incubators and mentoring.

Do you have any questions or remarks? Meet me in the comments and let’s talk.