The sales guys would agree that reliability and scalability affect 1) The ability to take on new business (a big problem if you're kicking ass and growing fas

The sales guys would agree that reliability and scalability affect 1) The ability to take on new business (a big problem if you're kicking ass and growing fast.) 2) The cost of delivering service to those customers. 3) The ability to deliver new features because developers aren't spending their time fixing existing ones or helping operations fight fires caused by the existing ones. Sales will agree about all of that. However, when it comes time to argue over priorities, they'll fight tooth and nail to get resources devoted to new development instead of scalability and reliability -- until stuff is broken, customers are angry, and their reputation is going into the toilet. At that point they'll rightly pin the blame on you, though. They want you to be responsible and do your job. They just won't reward you for it with "visibility." Actually, the best way to get sales guys on the side of reliability and scalability is when they're told to stop selling a product because your systems or operations staff can barely support currently provisioned customers, but good luck making that happen without having a report of SLA penalties already paid and a convincing projection of large penalties in the future. Also, at that point, you'll already have signed or nearly-signed deals that haven't been deployed yet. So if you just go along with the sales guys, they'll drive you into a freakin' ditch. The sales guys do not have a balanced view of the business any more than the developers do. Everybody has to contribute their piece of the picture and fight for the priorities that they understand. When the engineers stop sticking up for what they understand better than anybody else, things get out of balance, your technical assets start to crumble, and eventually you're technically bankrupt. But throwing engineering priorities under the boat and doing anything necessary to please the sales guys in the short term can make you very popular. "Visibility" means making people who drive revenue happy, and abdicating your responsibility to deliver bad news is the easiest way to achieve it. But the worst aspect of "visibility" is that from outside engineering, the applications that are chronically broken are perceived as the vital core of ongoing feature development, and the developers who work on those applications get the most visibility. If you asked a sales guy to write a list of the most valuable developers in the company, that's who they would name. Can you imagine a more perverse incentive?