Meet the Team: Andrew Gordon

Get to know Andrew Gordon, Content Strategist at Catchy. Andrew shares his perspective on crafting content strategies, driving developer engagement, and delivering impactful results for clients in the developer marketing industry.

Andrew Gordon

Content Strategist

Team Catchy

In today's Meet the Team, we hear from Andrew Gordon, Content Strategist at Catchy. Andrew discusses how his consulting, copywriting, and technical communication background helps him build content strategies for developer audiences and solve problems through collaboration.

Andrew is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, PA. In addition to his role at Catchy, he serves his alma mater as an adjunct professor of professional communications. As part of our strategy team, Andrew creates developer marketing strategies, fosters developer engagement, and delivers technical value to our clients. He'll share insights from his background in teaching, technical writing, and marketing.

What are your primary responsibilities as a Content Strategist at Catchy?

As a content strategist, my job is basically to create the ‘map’ that our marketing, copywriting, and creative teams follow while developing marketing and messaging for clients. In other words, I distill and codify the core messages that our clients are trying to convey across their various marketing and messaging. At a day-to-day level, this often means doing benchmarking research and competitive analyses, conducting interviews with client stakeholders, and building out strategic documents such as user journeys, messaging frameworks, and content marketing playbooks. I am also responsible for positioning these messaging strategies to our other internal teams and reviewing their work to keep output aligned with the high-level strategy.

Which Catchy value do you strongly resonate with and why? (Collaborative, Fluid, Inclusive, Accountable)

Collaborative.

Diverse perspectives and multidisciplinary teams produce the best work. From a content angle, being able to hit the mark revolves around getting out of your own head and putting yourself in the shoes of the audience (if you can pardon my mixed metaphors). Whether collaborating internally with people with diverse skill sets, or collaborating with clients and stakeholders to draw out their insights and pain points, good marketing is not possible without collaboration.

Here at Catchy, the fact that it is one of our core value pillars demonstrates that we really care about telling the right story, and we are always looking for more ways to inject collaboration into the strategy-building process.

Can you share a bit about your background and how it contributes to your strategy work?

I went to school first to be a high school English teacher, and I have been teaching in one form or another for my entire professional life. At its core, teaching is basically figuring out how to package and share information so that the target audience understands it, remembers it, and engages with it in the desired way. Why does that sound familiar? Oh yeah–that’s basically the definition of content strategy. Beyond the audience and storytelling component, teaching is also a constant exercise in problem-solving and adaptability, both of which are also at the heart of content strategy.

After I got my English/Secondary Education degree, I got a graduate degree in professional writing. The professional writing program at Carnegie Mellon helped me build and refine my communications ethos, and taught me not just how to be an effective writer, but how to identify, explain, and advocate for the importance of good communication–especially to non-writers–which is at the center of my role as a content strategist.

Aside from teaching and schooling, I also worked for more than a decade in the agency world, first at a marketing and communications agency, and then as the communications arm of a software consulting and creative agency. In these settings, I was exposed to an incredibly diverse corpus of client industries, and I developed skills in uncovering and understanding client needs, and turning this insight into work that hits the mark for the user's needs–things that I do on a daily basis at Catchy.

As a writing instructor, how do you incorporate your teaching experience into your work as a content strategist?

I am extremely fortunate to be able to do what I teach, and teach what I do. Each semester, I teach around 50 students the value in and techniques to being understood, most of whom are studying computer science, robotics, software engineering, and AI. Working with the best computer science students in the world (I’m not just saying that) is humbling, but it gives me daily first-hand experience interfacing with the exact audience demographic for whom I am building content strategy. Plus it keeps me sharp in my own communication principles; as the cliche goes, you learn more from teaching something than you do from studying it as a student.

What role do you see content playing in developer engagement and community-building within the tech industry?

Everyone always says that developers are allergic to advertising. No developer wants some slimy sales pitch or a hard sell on why they need to use some developer tool. What makes developers adopt new tools and technologies is clear, approachable, and honest information, together with hands-on experience. That’s why strong communication is so important. Communication is the key to engaging with developers, and engaging with developers in an honest and transparent way is the key to community-building.

Any advice for your younger self?

Build and maintain relationships with people in all disciplines and all stages of their careers. It’s not disingenuous to use your network to open doors and diversify your knowledge–learning this early will give you a leg up in your career for the rest of your life.

Oh yeah, and buy some Bitcoin.

Want to work with Andrew and the rest of the Catchy team? Well, you’re in luck - we’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for our current openings.