The infamous battle for ownership of the company website. I've seen this too many times to recall each instance but the theme is the same. Engineering, often the UX team, has built the website in such a way that it is nearly impossible for marketing to manage it without their permission. Ruby on rails ringing any bells??
Enter the heated debate of who should own the company website. Does this belong in engineering or does this belong in marketing?
Why Engineering Wants to Own It
If you company has a dedicated UX team for your product, this team is likely going to want to have some stake in the website. They are masters of experience, they know design and this is their domain. They should own the website - naturally.
Now for engineering teams without dedicated UX resources, the ownership of the website makes sense because this is the team that knows code and CSS and scripts and Java and all that other 'stuff' that makes a website do what we want it to do. They should own the website - naturally.
Why Marketing Wants to Own It
Anything and everything marketing does to drive awareness, generate leads, accelerate leads, retain customers, etc. is reliant upon the website experience. Every single dollar spent is reliant upon the website experience.
Measuring impact, building campaigns and optimizing for maximum return are optimal when marketing has the ability to instantly make changes to the website in real-time without the need to submit a ticket or have a discussion about why it needs to be done.
The website is the front door to your business and it's marketing's job to drive people to that door, open it and stay for awhile. They should own the website - naturally.
So Who Should Own It?
Throughout my career as I encounter organizations who have built their site in such a way that it is impossible for marketing to take ownership, they have eventually migrated to a 'marketing friendly' platform like Wordpress or Drupal.
Why?
Engineering and UX are your resources for your product and your product is where you make your money. Tying up their time to build text and images on a company website is a waste of resources, in my opinion, when they could be building really cool features and functions.
Marketing needs to own the website. Their ability to make adjustments and optimize for conversions is severely handicapped when you introduce the need for them to submit a ticket to support and wait for the change to happen.
It's simply not scalable or effective for either team.
TIP: This is not an easy battle for marketing to win, so go into it with data and fair reasoning for why marketing should own the site. There are two HUGE ones I can give you off the bat; 1) It will impact lead flow in a positive way and 2) Engineers can focus 100% of their time on the product.