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From what I've skimmed, the author blames sales-focused companies for being too obsessed with capturing value. And this is a bad thing. He also blames product-

• deleted 6y ago
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• spzb 6y ago
  That was my takeaway too so if you're naive, you're not alone.
  • crmd 6y ago
    What’s funny is that bullshit factories like McKinsey and BCG convert shallow insights such as this into billion dollar pipelines. You could turn this blog post into a PowerPoint presentation, and corporate boards will happily pay you $250k a pop to interview people and diagnose their company as too sales or product driven, with the recommendation to become market driven. Even the football offense/defense thing, delivered verbally during the board presentation, will be met with deep nods of understanding and help energize the room and make you look like a rockstar. Some of the board members will literally be thinking, “we need a CEO like this guy”. Once their check clears, you give the same analysis to the next company down the road for another $250k.
    • JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
      Even if it's the placebo effect, if McKinsey can make organizations operate more effectively with pre-fab slide decks, then it's worth it. They are providing value to the organization.
      • dasil003 6y ago
        The point is that probably 20% of the ICs at the company could diagnose the problem over a beer but management keeps such a stranglehold over access and narrative that only an overpaid consultant wearing a nice suit is acceptable politically.
        • afarrell 6y ago
          Sure. Similarly, the US government "knew" about 9/11 and Pearl Harbour hours before the planes hit anything. But understanding which signals to pay attention to and make decisions upon is genuinely a hard challenge of leadership.
          • dasil003 6y ago
            Agreed. But are you saying McKinsey is better at that?
            • mpyne 6y ago
              For better or worse, McKinsey and outfits like them have an ability to package a given set of advice in a way that the needed audience will be more likely to heed. Partly because they can MBA the lingo, but also just from the imputed competence that comes from having spent a goddamn boatload on their brand name.
              • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
                That makes sense, and is a really good example of organizational cognitive dissonance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
    • ArnoVW 6y ago
      Speaking from 11 years of consulting experience (and 5 years of SaaS product dev BTW), when I was consultant we always used to say that the price was part of the medecine. People tend to clear their agenda and listen closely more easily if they think you are worth listening to. Hence the suits and ties. It's stupid, but it works.
    • xmprt 6y ago
      McKinsey are overpaid lifestyle coaches for companies.
  • bob33212 6y ago
    The difference is that with football every single week you get to see the score and watch the defense and offense separately. So it is very obvious that your awesome offence didn't make up for your lack of a good defense. With a startup you can end up with the equivalent of the coach saying that although the defense never stopped a single play, the offense should have done a better job running out the clock, and that is why they lost. Or the coach saying that although the offense never got a single first down, the defense should have returned some of the interceptions for touchdowns and that is why they lost.
• musingsole 6y ago
  Yeah, the message is to elevate the company's perspective to be aware of both sides of the transaction in which it takes part. Life is always a game of balance. It may be obvious that you have to balance giving/taking as a business, but I've never seen business leaders talk this way. My experience is inline with the article in that businesses seem to go all in on one or the other as opposed to harmonizing the 2.
  • cjblomqvist 6y ago
    A big reason for this, in particularly with big companies, is that managing them is like steering a tanker. Do you want to stop ASAP you need to do full thrust the other way for a while. Obviously not the perfect metaphor, but for sure a part of it
• reader_mode 6y ago
  >Maybe I'm being naive, but this seems a tad obvious, and not all that useful. IMO I've often seen extreeme scenarios and then a reactionary 180 swing to the other extreeme, it's usefull to recognise that both approaches are extreemes. It might be obvious to you but I constantly see devs that fail to recognise sales focus has value - like we need to ship feature X by Y to get client Z otherwise the opportunity is gone. I'd say 2/3 devs I've worked with will immediatly push back with concerns such as long term maintainability, scalability, etc. None of those would be a blocker for the sale or the initial customer, and once you land the customer you'll have the budget to go back and fix it - but yeah still a deathmatch to get those through sprint planning. And queue jaded devs here claming "they do it because they know once it's commited it will never get fixed", honestly whenever I come up with actual problems and solutions I can't remember being turned down (deffered a couple of times, still got to do it eventually) - I've worked for 2 startups, and 4 enterprise teams. So if you're not getting space to do this kind of improvements and care about code quality - maybe consider changing your workplace.
  • goalieca 6y ago
    > and once you land the customer you'll have the budget to go back and fix it There’s always one more sale in the pipeline and you can end up with 15 year old products that are entirely the result of feature chasing. I think it is absolutely necessary for development to develop a better understanding of customers and their requirements. Is it possible for us to predict some of the features from customers 1..2.. or maybe 5 years down the line in a way that the architecture and design can easily accommodate? I think it is somewhat possible and there are many examples of flexible products that do just that.
    • nostrebored 6y ago
      The key here is that product is a buffer between sales and engineering. Sales teams should be a constant source of feedback for product teams who can spot the synergies you're talking about. SDMs should be a constant buffer between engineers and product. This works wonders at an enterprise or mid market company. I don't envy smaller companies that need to drive alignment between stakeholders that have to straddle all of these lines. A good portion of my job is helping small businesses find that alignment and being able to present the big picture to all of these teams. Somehow being external seems to help.
• oneplane 6y ago
  It seems to me that picking any single extreme will leave you losing on other fronts. Market-focused has its own problems, for example because the market doesn't actually always know what it wants, needs or already has. Abstracting people into a 'business' with 'tech and business', interacting with other people that are 'market' is nice for pictures, but rarely tells the whole story, and oversimplifies things to the point where you can't make complete choices.
• alisonkisk 6y ago
  It's useful for building the blogger's brand.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  It seems obvious in retrospect, but over-focusing on a single domain (sales, product, design, marketing, engineering) to the detriment of everything else is a common problem with first-time leaders. Inexperienced leaders tend to focus on their own background while downplaying the importance of topics they are less familiar with. The genesis of these problems is often the CEO or other executive’s own background. A CEO who came from a sales background tends to give sales whatever they want at the expense of everything else. A CEO who started as an engineer might overengineer everything and neglect distribution. A CEO with a design background might focus too much on making a beautiful product while neglecting usability, engineering, and distribution. These are common traps for first-time leaders, especially those who have risen quickly through the ranks. It can take time to understand that balance is necessary.
  • drc500free 6y ago
    I’ve also seen the flip side of this. Sometimes the founder understands the need to hire and build for the other domains, but their own function remains immature because they rely on their own skill and don’t know how to externalize it into a self sufficient department. They get the high level stuff right but don’t have time for the details anymore.
• danjac 6y ago
  These two examples do feel like strawmen, and are somewhat simplified. For example, "product-led" in this example lumps together PMs, designers and developers into a single group, whereas in fact there is conflict inherent in features vs user experience vs technical debt/constraints. Moreover even a sales-driven company is not going to promise a unique feature for every customer, unless they want to run out of money quickly or they are in the enterprise customer market with a small number of clients.
• clairity 6y ago
  sounds like a false dichotomy to make a naive point. define two extremes, label them bad, and label the middle good. i'd note that it's hard to go wrong delivering value to the customer first ("product-led"), then trying to capture some of that value for yourself later, because the key to the whole system is that there is some new value created that can be shared. the main danger is not being capitalized enough to eventually capture some of the value and sustain the business. sales-led tries to capture the value first, then deliver (some of) it to the customer, which can create misaligned incentives and a potentially antagonistic relationship, as it's hard to predict (and agree on) value in the future, and it's tempting to cheap out on the delivery. but importantly, both can work depending on the market dynamics. it's not strictly an either-or situation, which is the domain of the false dichotomy.
• Spooky23 6y ago
  There was a great article a few years ago about how Dell ditched all of its manufacturing to improve its balance sheet for Wall St analysts. In the process, they basically built up Taiwanese companies like Asus into competition at Dell shareholder expense. The CEO of one of the Taiwanese companies said something to the effect of “American managers like ratios, I prefer cash”. Leadership is different than management. In a growing company if some McKinsey alum solves all of your problems with a spreadsheet and fancy PowerPoint, you’re in trouble. Likewise, if some engineering team is setting money on fire building the platonic ideal of an application, you’re in trouble. Good leaders marshal those resources to make the sum of the parts greater and better.
• ori_b 6y ago
  As always: Reasonable and thoughtful beats all alternatives.
• felipellrocha 6y ago
  It might seem obvious to you, but I've been in plenty of companies that focused on one or the other and wondered why things were always burning down. Sometimes there is value in stating the obvious, because it might not be that obvious to everyone.
• jjav 6y ago
  There's also more angles than these. An engineering-focused company builds stable sustainable products for the long haul. Which means sometimes saying No to customers and to visionary product managers. On the negative side, sometimes sight of the forest is lost by focusing on perfection of each tree. One really needs all three players with equal power at the table in order to create a balanced company.