Why your engineers are the worst people to direct a Product Video
The person who understands your product best is structurally the worst placed to explain it.
The person who understands your product best is the worst person to explain it. This is not a criticism of engineers. It is a known cognitive effect with a name, and once you see it you cannot unsee it in your own material.
The curse
In 1990 a Stanford doctoral student ran an experiment. One group tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song on a table. Another group listened and guessed the song. The tappers predicted the listeners would identify the song about half the time. The listeners got it right in around 2.5% of cases.
The tappers could hear the melody in their heads while they tapped. The listeners heard knocking.
This is what happens when your CTO writes the homepage. They can hear the melody. They know what the acronym expands to, why the tolerance matters, what the alternative approaches are and why you rejected them. The reader hears knocking.
The effect is called the curse of knowledge, and its defining feature is that expertise makes it worse. The more completely you understand something, the harder it becomes to reconstruct what it was like not to understand it. You cannot fix it by trying harder.
What it looks like on a page
I read a lot of technical websites. The same four patterns turn up constantly.
The undefined noun. A term appears in the first sentence and is never explained, because inside the company nobody has needed it explained for years. The reader either knows it or leaves.
The comparative with no baseline. "40% faster." Than what? Than your previous version, than the market leader, than doing it manually? A number without a reference point is decoration.
The buried real sentence. Somewhere in paragraph four, usually as an aside, there is one plain sentence that actually explains the product. It got written last, after the writer had warmed up. It belongs at the top and it is almost never at the top.
The specification that answers a question nobody asked yet. Payload capacity, cycle time, IP rating. All correct, all useful, all completely wasted on someone who has not yet worked out whether this category of product is relevant to them.
The part that costs money
If it were only the website, this would be a marketing annoyance. It is not only the website.
The same gap shows up in the room. Your engineer presents to a buying committee. The technical people in the room follow it and are convinced. The commercial director signs the purchase order and understands roughly one third of what was said. That person then has to defend the spend internally, to a board or a finance function, using an explanation they cannot reproduce.
The deal does not get rejected. It stalls. It goes quiet for six weeks and then somebody says the timing is not right.
That is what the curse of knowledge costs. Not a lower conversion rate on a landing page. A stalled deal that everyone blames on budget.
Why hiring a copywriter usually does not fix it
The standard response is to hire someone outside the company to write the copy. Reasonable instinct, mixed results, and the reason is worth understanding.
A generalist copywriter does not have the curse of knowledge. They also do not have the knowledge. So they write something clear and non-specific, which reads well and says nothing that could not be said about any company in your sector. You have traded incomprehensible for interchangeable.
The research on this is fairly blunt. Content that could describe any company in any sector reads as generic to buyers, and buyers use exactly this to judge whether a vendor has real expertise.
What actually works is harder to arrange. You need someone who knows enough to ask the right follow-up questions and does not know so much that they stop noticing the gaps. That person exists in a narrow window: informed enough to be dangerous, not informed enough to be cursed.
A test you can run this week
Take your homepage. Send it to someone who works in a completely different industry, ideally in a finance or operations role, and ask them two questions.
What does this company make?
Who is it for?
Do not explain anything first. Do not defend the copy afterwards. Just note what they say.
If they cannot answer both questions from the page alone, your homepage is written for people who already understand your product. Those people were going to buy anyway.
What to do about it
The fix is not simplification. Simplifying a genuinely complex product usually makes it sound trivial, which is its own problem: if it sounds easy, buyers wonder why it costs what it costs.
The fix is sequencing. Give the reader what they need in the order they need it.
Start with the problem the buyer already recognises, in their words. Then what your product does about it, in one sentence with no acronyms. Then why it is different from the thing they are doing now. Only then the specification, for the reader who has decided the category matters and now wants to evaluate.
Most technical websites run this in reverse. They open with capability and never reach the problem, because inside the company the problem is so obvious that stating it feels condescending.
It is not obvious to the person signing.
FAQ
Should engineers be involved in writing marketing copy at all? Yes, but as the source rather than the author. The technical accuracy has to come from them and nobody else can supply it. The sequencing and the language should come from someone who can still hear the knocking. Splitting these two jobs is the single most useful change most technical companies can make to their copy process.
How technical should a homepage be? Technical enough to be credible to an engineer who visits, simple enough that a CFO understands what you sell. These are less in conflict than they seem. Engineers are not offended by a clear opening sentence. They are offended by claims that are wrong, which is a different problem.
Is this a problem for a company selling only to engineers? Usually yes, because the engineer is rarely the only person involved. In most B2B purchases above a few thousand euros there is at least one person in the approval chain who does not share the technical background. That person needs something to read too.
What about AI writing tools? They remove the curse of knowledge and replace it with the absence of knowledge, which produces the interchangeable-copy problem faster and at greater volume. They are useful for restructuring something you have already written and much less useful for deciding what to say.
How do I know if my copy has this problem? Run the two-question test above with three people outside your sector. If all three answer both questions correctly, you do not have this problem. In my experience most companies get one out of three.