To run better marketing tests, try an engineering mindset 

The concept of cross training—working on one skill as a way to strengthen another—is widely practiced, from runners who swim to improve their cardio efficiency to hockey players who box to boost their balance. 

And it can apply to your marketing team as well. 

Brian Krall, VP of Performance Marketing at food tech company Tovala, is an unusual kind of growth marketer. 

For one thing, he spent the first 10+ years of his career as a front-end developer and UI developer, before his interest in startups brought him to Tovala. Today, he focuses on performance and growth (such as leading the price testing strategy that helped 5x conversions).

This technical background allows Brian to bring an engineering mindset to marketing challenges, bridging the gap between “the right-brained creative marketers over here” and “the left-brained tech team over there.”

It’s organizational cross-training: Practicing engineering principles can make your team better at their own “sport” of marketing. 

When you connect technical competency with marketing expertise, your team can experiment faster, analyze more deeply, and learn better.

You need a cross-functional team 

Many companies separate technical implementation from marketing strategy, missing how engineering thinking can help growth teams run faster, more systemic experiments.Brian’s own team is more collaborative, including:

• Growth marketing managers who run point on different channels (direct mail, TV, Meta, etc.) 
• A director of lifecycle marketing, who manages customer comms and customer engagement strategies  
• A senior software engineer, who helps the marketing team run tests and make back-end adjustments 
• And a full-funnel performance agency that supports the execution of paid ad campaigns, media buying, and reporting

The most cross-functional team at Tovala is the conversion rate optimization (CRO) team, which brings together folks from design, UX, engineering, and data each week to plan sprints and build experiments.“It’s been so helpful to stay close to the engineering side of the business as I work on growth marketing,” says Brian. “That technical bridge means we can build things without taking weeks and weeks of work.”(ICYMI: We wrote about how to wrangle a cross-functional marketing project here.)

A bottoms-up experimentation model

Engineering thinking—which includes systematic hypothesis testing, rigorous methodologies, and technical competency—transforms growth marketing from a guessing game into a predictable system for driving conversions.

Source ideas from a wider group to leverage different expertise 

Brian recommends asking each person on the team to share a project they’d want to push forward that month or quarter. 

“Typically people recommend changes to the things they have the most influence over,” says Brian. “The copywriter will key in on a headline, while the web engineer will look at page speed.” 

This individual ownership model was inspired by Pinterest’s “bottoms-up” approach to growth engineering, where ideas and responsibilities flow through the team rather than coming from top-down management directives. 

“You get so much more momentum when you give ownership to the team,” says Brian. “It’s amazing to have seven people to recommend seven things, versus having one person who can only come up with two or three.” 

Run multiple experiments at once 

We’ve all had exciting ideas fizzle out in “we don’t know how to set this up ourselves” land. 

When marketing and engineering are closely connected, you can set up, run, and analyze tests—like new landing pages, new customer flows, or new exit surveys—at a much faster cadence. 

“To keep things clear, we tend to run two experiments at a time,” says Brian. “But we run them every two weeks or so, so the feedback loops are very quick.” 

Brian also believes in only running tests you have some conviction will work—not just what’s easy to measure.  

His team relies on tools like Typeform’s partial submit feature to gather user insights, collecting data even from surveys that get abandoned partway through. The team feeds all survey data into their analytics platform to correlate qualitative feedback with customer behavior and lifetime value. 

At their current pace, Brian’s team can complete a handful of discrete tests every quarter, allowing them to make continuous, informed refinements to their marketing funnel.

See your ideas work: Ownership creates momentum 

“When someone is able to push their recommendation through to reality, see it get to the consumer, and understand how it performs—that’s just addictive,” says Brian. 

A marketing–engineering partnership lets your team not only share their ideas, but also get tests live and measure reactions in real time, so experiments don’t fizzle. 

“When you have ownership of your ideas, you’re less likely to let them go,” Brian adds. “I’ve seen projects move a lot faster because the team has the autonomy to make decisions and push them forward.” 

The simple truth is that people feel more excited to work on something they have a stake in. Allowing them to actually see their own ideas through is a great way to create those stakes.

The future of growth marketing 

As AI tools make it easier to build and test without extensive development resources, companies that don’t have a system for constant experimentation will fall behind. 

First-party data will also become more important as teams need to find what works specifically for them in order to stand apart in an increasingly busy, homogenous competitive landscape. 

For marketers who want to bring a collaborative engineering mindset to their own team, Brian suggests a few key principles:  

Connect with your technical teams to stay abreast of tech innovations. “There’s a ton happening right now in AI,” says Brian. “Being involved with the software team has allowed me to see much farther ahead than the rest of the organization when it comes to experimenting with and using AI tools.” 

Prioritize customer insights over industry best practices. There’s a lot of conventional marketing wisdom out there—but only you know what applies to your specific team, business model, and product. Building a custom flow got better results for Tovala than borrowing the playbook from Amazon or Shopify ever did. 

Maintain technical depth, even at the leadership level. Leaders should maintain hands-on involvement (or at least understanding) at the implementation level, even as they set strategy. “If you get too far removed from what’s tactically happening, you lose a lot of perspective,” says Brian. “The best leaders can draw a line from building to vision.” 

As companies compete for limited attention, it’s teams that cross-train between technical rigor and creative strategy that will ultimately bring home the gold.