You need both. I used to work in a place where (1) was called as "Customer Engineering" and (2) as "Product/Standard Engineering" (i was part of this group). T

You need both. I used to work in a place where (1) was called as "Customer Engineering" and (2) as "Product/Standard Engineering" (i was part of this group). The former allows you to hook in the customer and keep him engaged with quick feature deliverables in separate code branches some of which are then rolled into the "master" branch (with due diligence like refactoring, making it robust and more general etc.) after due consultations with Marketing/Sales. I was a skeptic initially, thinking (1) would be producing crap code which would need extensive rewrite but that didn't happen in reality. They were experienced developers themselves (this is the key for (1) ) and so the code was mostly okay and needed little tweaking. Everything worked surprisingly well. I believe every Company needs to have these two groups in Engineering.