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When decisions are heavily sales-driven--be it the loudest voices in the room are the sales team, or a big deal is coming down the pipeline requiring custom wor
by amb23 8y ago
When decisions are heavily sales-driven--be it the loudest voices in the room are the sales team, or a big deal is coming down the pipeline requiring custom work--individual solutions start overriding problem-based thinking. It leads to a nasty cycle where clients just blindly ask for features and changes, but no one actually sits down to discuss or think about the "why" behind them.
Honestly the best way to deal with this is to train sales and client-facing teams to start defining the problem in the first place, and to set expectations with clients that the conversation needs to be about problems instead of proposed solutions. Product then needs to gather all the requirements (scoping how much dev work it takes, metrics on how much a change affects all clients vs. individual ones) to make good decisions on what the best solution should be. It's cheap to say "product teams need to be more problem-focused" because the idea pipeline rarely starts on the product team in the first place. Client-facing teams need to play a stronger role in defining the problem itself.
(This is mostly relevant for B2B, by the way. May not be as true for consumer tech.)
- blazespin 8y agoThat’s just it. It’s B2B versus B2C. Facebook can have a rule, code wins arguments because they can do A/B testing. Enterprise software can not.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"When decisions are heavily sales-driven--be it the loudest voices in the room are the sales team, or a big deal is coming down the pipeline requiring custom work--individual solutions start overriding problem-based thinking. It leads to a nasty cycle where clients just blindly ask for features and changes, but no one actually sits down to discuss or think about the "why" behind them." Very true. I have seen this plenty of times. At some point you need someone who keeps the big picture in mind.
- hinkley 8y agoIn the time before app stores, I gave up on the mobile space because I saw this pattern happen at every B2B place I worked and the places by colleagues had worked. Every network was a unique snowflake and we would bend over backward to get customer 3, creating a piece of code that was so difficult to land customer 5 that we started burning through money and people. The worst one was the place where management and the sales people thought we should go after the biggest fish first (because they were looking for an exit). This created a problem where we had given sweetheart deals (low or in many cases negative margins) to the people who we should have had the easiest time getting cashflow positive off of. If only we'd waited to land them until we had more experience. Don't land the whale until you know what to do with it.