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...
