I came to marketing through engineering, because I wanted to see the math

I started my career in development. Custom software builds, PLC programming, contract work I picked up during COVID after finishing an electrical engineering degree at UET in Lahore.

I was good at code. I didn’t love it. The reason I didn’t love it was specific: I couldn’t see what the code did for the business.

You’d ship a feature. The client would say great. Three weeks later you’d ask if it was being used and they’d say yes, mostly. There was no number you could point to. The work was real but the impact was abstract. In 2020, before LLMs made coding cheap, that mattered more — you’d spend a week on something and never know if the week was worth it.

I drifted into marketing through the internet, which is the way most people drift into marketing. I took a few courses. The thing that pulled me in was not the creative side or the storytelling side or the “growth hacking” side. It was the math.

You spend a dollar. You see a result. You change a bid. You see what changes. There’s no abstraction between the input and the output. Every variable you touch produces a number you can read, in close to real time, in a dashboard. If the input was wrong, the dashboard tells you. If the input was right, the dashboard tells you that too.

This is obvious to people who’ve always done marketing. It’s not obvious to people coming from development. Development is full of layers — your code goes through frameworks, deployment pipelines, user interactions, business processes — and most of the time you can’t tell whether the thing you wrote did the thing you wanted. Marketing collapses all of that. You ran an ad. People clicked or they didn’t. You can read the data ten minutes after you launched.

I picked Amazon specifically because Amazon is the most measurable corner of marketing. Every step is tracked. Click-through, conversion, attribution, lifetime value, share of voice — all of it instrumented, all of it visible, all of it accessible through the API if you know how to ask. For someone who came from engineering and wanted to see the math, Amazon was the obvious place to land.

The thing that surprised me, after three years of working on Amazon accounts every day, is how few people in this space actually look at the math. Most account managers manage to dashboards. They see ACOS, they see ROAS, they manage to those two numbers, they don’t go deeper. Engineering instinct says: those numbers are outputs of a system. The interesting questions are about the system that produced them. Why did CPC double in this category between Q2 and Q3? Why does this ASIN convert at 14% while its sibling converts at 6%? Why does this campaign perform when bid up by 20% but break when bid up by 25%? The numbers people manage to are the surface. The system underneath is where the work is.

This is, I think, the actual reason I’m running an agency. Not because I’m a marketer. I’m not. I’m an engineer who came to marketing because I wanted to see the math, and stayed because I realized most people in the space are managing the dashboards instead of studying the system.