Is GitHub becoming the new CV for marketers?

A while ago, I posted on LinkedIn that GitHub might become the new CV for marketers. People had opinions. Some marketers loved the idea, some had no idea what GitHub was, and a few developers seemed slightly concerned that marketers were invading their territory.

I was on the Pipebuilders podcast this week, talking with Florian Kaspar about a LinkedIn post I wrote. Three short clips from that conversation are dropped in through the piece.

So let me clarify something: I don’t think you should delete your CV and send recruiters a GitHub link instead. I do think the traditional CV is becoming less useful at showing what makes a great marketer great. A CV can tell me that you know HubSpot, Clay, Webflow or n8n. It can tell me you’re “data-driven”, “AI-native” or experienced with automation. But those words are becoming incredibly cheap. What I increasingly want to know is simple: what have you actually built?

AI has changed what marketers can build

Not long ago, if I had an idea for an internal tool, I probably needed a developer. I’d explain the idea, they’d put it somewhere in their backlog, client or product work would understandably take priority, and maybe we’d build it six months later. Maybe we’d never build it.

That constraint is disappearing. I’m not a software developer, and I couldn’t sit down and build a production application for millions of users from scratch. But with AI, I can build things that solve problems for me and my team. I’ve built automations, small applications, scrapers and internal tools. When I was looking for a job, for example, I built a workflow that scraped relevant LinkedIn jobs and helped generate personalised CVs and cover letters.

The point isn’t that every marketer should suddenly become an engineer. It’s that we can now go from “I wish there was a tool that did this” to “I made a rough version, want to try it?” much faster than before. That changes what one person can realistically do inside a marketing team.

The job one looked like this:

You don’t need to be a developer

There’s a strange assumption in some of these discussions that marketers becoming more technical means marketers are trying to become software engineers. We’re not.

You don’t need to understand every line of code, but I do think you should understand what you’ve built. If something breaks, can you roughly diagnose where the problem is? Can you explain what the different parts are doing? Can you modify the workflow when your requirements change? Can you explain why you built it in the first place?

There’s a difference between prompting an AI with “build me an app” and actually understanding the system you’ve created. The goal isn’t to become a developer. It’s to become a marketer who isn’t stopped by the fact that something requires a little bit of code.

That’s where GitHub gets interesting

Traditionally, GitHub has been a place for software developers to store and collaborate on code. For marketers, I think it can become something slightly different: a portfolio of how you solve problems.

Creative marketers already understand this concept. If you’re hiring a designer, you want to see their designs. If you’re hiring a copywriter, you want to read their copy. You wouldn’t just accept “experienced in creating high-performing brand assets.” You’d ask to see them.

Technical marketing should work the same way. If you say you’ve built automated lead qualification, show me. If you built an attribution workflow, document it. If you made a weird internal tool that saved you three hours every week, put it somewhere people can see it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be GitHub. A personal website, Loom walkthrough or Notion page can work too. But GitHub is particularly good for this kind of work because it lets people see more than the finished demo.

So, since I just said show me, here is the lead qualification one:

Show the kitchen, not just the finished meal

LinkedIn naturally encourages us to show the polished version: the clean screenshot, the perfect demo, the automation conveniently running without errors. GitHub lets people look a little further behind the scenes.

What did you actually make? How is it structured? What did you struggle with? Did you abandon half of it? What would you change now?

That is often more interesting than whether the final application looks impressive, because companies increasingly say they want builders: people who can spot a problem, form an idea and make something happen without needing a perfectly defined project around them. “Builder mindset” is difficult to prove in a CV bullet point. Showing something you built is much easier.

Your projects don’t even have to succeed

You don’t need a GitHub full of ten perfect SaaS applications. A half-working project can tell me a lot if you can explain what you were trying to solve, why you built it, what worked, what didn’t and what you learned.

One of the things I like most about building publicly is that other people can also take parts of your work and use them. In the interview, I mentioned a small fitness app I had built where I could photograph food and use AI to estimate calories. Someone else was working on a similar project and ended up taking one useful part of my build and incorporating it into his own. It wasn’t some huge commercial application, but it showed exactly why sharing work can be useful.

Your abandoned experiment might contain the exact piece someone else needs. And someone else’s project might solve the problem you’ve been stuck on for three days.

Technical and creative marketing are getting closer together

We often split marketers into two camps: creative marketers over here, technical marketers over there. I’m not sure that distinction works as neatly anymore.

Technical work requires creativity too. You have to notice inefficiencies, imagine a better process, connect systems that weren’t designed to work together and figure out different ways of solving a problem. Sometimes the creative output is an ad. Sometimes it’s a campaign. Sometimes it’s an automation that removes six manual steps from a process.

The medium changes, but the creative thinking doesn’t. AI simply makes it much easier for people who sit somewhere in the middle to execute those ideas.

That’s probably where I sit. Technical enough to build things, not technical enough to pretend I’m an engineer, and curious enough to keep trying anyway. I suspect a lot of marketers are going to end up in that same space.

Start by building something useful to you

If you’ve never opened GitHub, don’t start by asking, “What impressive application can I build for recruiters?” That’s backwards.

Build something you actually want. Automate an annoying part of your work. Make a tiny reporting tool. Build something around a hobby. Connect two APIs because you’re curious whether you can. Create an internal tool your team has been talking about for months.

It can be small. It can break. Nobody else needs to use it. You just need to start, then document what happened.

Because the interesting part isn’t that you generated 3,000 lines of code with Claude. The interesting part is that you saw a problem, decided you could solve it and figured out enough of the technical details to make something work.

Your CV tells me where you’ve been. Your work shows me how you think.

I still have a CV, and I still think you need one. But if I were hiring a marketer today and had two candidates with similar experience, and one could show me five things they had built because they were curious about a problem, I’d want to talk to that person.

Not because GitHub automatically makes them a better marketer, and definitely not because writing code is suddenly the most important marketing skill. But because they have evidence of curiosity, initiative and experimentation.

AI has dramatically lowered the barrier between having an idea and building it. Marketers should take advantage of that.

And once you’ve built something, don’t hide it. Show your work.