“One of the key things I learned is: don't have different road maps. Make sure that your product road map is taking into account the whole organization. When performance marketing is closely related to the technical side of the business, it's all under one roof — and that created a lot of empathy where I was able to have a different perspective than most engineers.”

One Shared Roadmap Across Product and Marketing — No Engineering/Growth Divide

Ryan Beck ran both tech and performance marketing at Pray.com, which gave him unusual empathy for the marketers' needs and let him prioritize marketing infrastructure requests alongside product development on one shared roadmap. The result: no dysfunction between teams, faster execution on growth experiments, and a culture where every engineer thinks of themselves as a growth engineer. He cites Blinkist's CTO-led performance setup as the benchmark that validated this approach.