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There is a lack of mutual understanding that shipping code and closing a deal have a lot of similarities. A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity

There is a lack of mutual understanding that shipping code and closing a deal have a lot of similarities. A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC. We can estimate when the PR will be pushed to prod or the contract gets signed. Generally, the more experience you have, the better you’re at setting expectations on when a PR/opp will close. The PR or opp can stall, but it’s up to the person responsible for the PR or opp to notify the rest of the team that there will be a delay or figure out a way to unblock. The big difference is the lack of accountability. AFAIK if a developer misses shipping during a sprint, they’ll just add it to the next sprint. If a salesperson does this, after 2 quarters of missing your quota, you’re fired. Doesn’t matter if you had monster quarters before that, if you’re not hitting your numbers, GTFO. I think this is because sales have very clear metrics that everyone can agree upon: revenue, number of demos, cold outreach, etc. We’ve been tracking these types of metrics in cuneiform. Comp sci wasn’t a thing until the 1960s. It’s still too new and everyone has an opinion on what metrics to focus on without angering a developer for micromanaging them. This is where the friction lies; until that’s fixed, you will not have a cohesive team. I hope that AI takes over and we don’t need devs or salespeople anymore. context: I’m a sales guy that sold software that tracks “engineering performance” to VPs of Eng and CTOs depending on the size of your company. It was shocking to see the level of variance in measuring performance metrics for eng teams.

jordanbeiber 4y ago
I’ve seen this a lot in the industry - sales people selling stuff they don’t really understand; engineering perf for example. Sales is simple. It requires very little knowledge - as reflected by your “GTFO”. Had there been knowledge involved people would have been treated differently. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s just simple. As it is such a meat grinder I can only hope it gets replaced with AI as I’ve seen many in sales not feeling well. Trying to imprint sales principles on engineering or any other knowledge profession is what leads to horrible organizations filled with unhealthy practices and people.
- kqr 4y ago
  To be fair, these "sales principles" leads to horrible sales organisations filled with unhealthy sales practises and people too. There's a huge difference between good salespeople and bad ones, and it's not just about closing deals. It's about finding prospects that challenge the organisation in the right way. The practises you speak of beat any salesperson into becoming a bad one focused only on closing deals.
  - jordanbeiber 4y ago
    Totally agree - I'm challenging the sales dept over here to actually work with process goals instead of results. For example amount of meetings might be an interesting metric, but what makes for a GOOD meeting? Can we identify a good meeting and "turn up the good"? Much harder, and requires actual leadership.
    - andyjsong 4y ago
      you can generally measure that with churn in the enterprise Saas world. But that's a lag indicator so it's tough to see into the future. To address what a good meeting is, I worked for a startup where a salesperson closed Netflix as an account, we all gave each other high fives but they never used the product due to security concerns and churned a year later. Meanwhile I understood that we were still in early stages of product development and closed winery clients and they are still customers after three years because what we had at the time is what they needed. Netflix wasn't a bad customer, but the salesperson set expectations too high and the eng team got crushed by the demands.
  - andyjsong 4y ago
    Of course! There was a time when LOC was the measure of productivity just like the number of cold touches you make to convert to a discovery call. I've worked for public companies where you needed to make 300 cold calls a day and they are listed on NASDAQ. What I'm trying to say is that sales metrics has had time to evolve since 3500 BC. Meanwhile Comp Sci is still in it's infancy. The ironic part is that for an industry that is obsessed with data and metrics, engineers abhor any kind of metric to track performance because it's perceived more of an art. Meanwhile salespeople are under a microscope and are totally okay with it because if you're good, you're generally the highest paid person in the org.
valenterry 4y ago
> A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC What? For an Opportunity, it's usually pretty clear and very very easy to measure, how much the company gains from that and when. How do you measure the gains from a PR? If you can't than literally everything else is completely meaningless. Don't forget that PRs can also be net negative to the company.
- kqr 4y ago
  It's a myth that it's "very very easy" to measure how much the company gains from a sale. The base revenue is clear as day, yes. But then there's publicity, word-of-mouth, usually extra revenue streams, and the cost of the customer is often not at all clear until they've been onboarded. One of the big problems in most sales organisations I've seen is that they think that the base revenue is all that matters.
  - valenterry 4y ago
    True, but still. Unless we talk about highly custom enterprise contracts or so, the unit economics is much easier. Maybe not very very easy, I take that one back, haha. But estimating the marketing impact per contract signed is still more or less a one time thing. Not so with PRs.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    This is a good point. The sale is not equal to net present value. However, at least it is quantifiable in some way and somewhat easy to incentivize for. Much easier than attempting to assign net present value to a patch.
kqr 4y ago
> If a salesperson does this, after 2 quarters of missing your quota, you’re fired. Doesn’t matter if you had monster quarters before that, if you’re not hitting your numbers, GTFO. Did I get it right that you think this is the right approach for dealing with your salespeople, that it improves long-term productivity of the organisation?
- andyjsong 4y ago
  It depends. But I'd challenge you to ask your own sales leader at your company what their policy is and their reasoning.
john_the_writer 4y ago
On this. There are two major issues with "missing shipping" 1. More often than not the feature or the dev that holds thing back. It's the unknown, or didn't think of side effects. Like walking the coast of California in 2 weeks. If you don't hit a river or bit of beach that's been eroded away, or a cliff, you're good. 2. As you said metric take a while to figure out. Lets say we give Comp Sci a 10th of the time to figure out metrics as we've had at sales. So.. we should be all set in say 500 years :)

jordanbeiber 4y ago

I’ve seen this a lot in the industry - sales people selling stuff they don’t really understand; engineering perf for example. Sales is simple. It requires very little knowledge - as reflected by your “GTFO”. Had there been knowledge involved people would have been treated differently. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s just simple. As it is such a meat grinder I can only hope it gets replaced with AI as I’ve seen many in sales not feeling well. Trying to imprint sales principles on engineering or any other knowledge profession is what leads to horrible organizations filled with unhealthy practices and people.

kqr 4y ago
To be fair, these "sales principles" leads to horrible sales organisations filled with unhealthy sales practises and people too. There's a huge difference between good salespeople and bad ones, and it's not just about closing deals. It's about finding prospects that challenge the organisation in the right way. The practises you speak of beat any salesperson into becoming a bad one focused only on closing deals.
- jordanbeiber 4y ago
  Totally agree - I'm challenging the sales dept over here to actually work with process goals instead of results. For example amount of meetings might be an interesting metric, but what makes for a GOOD meeting? Can we identify a good meeting and "turn up the good"? Much harder, and requires actual leadership.
  - andyjsong 4y ago
    you can generally measure that with churn in the enterprise Saas world. But that's a lag indicator so it's tough to see into the future. To address what a good meeting is, I worked for a startup where a salesperson closed Netflix as an account, we all gave each other high fives but they never used the product due to security concerns and churned a year later. Meanwhile I understood that we were still in early stages of product development and closed winery clients and they are still customers after three years because what we had at the time is what they needed. Netflix wasn't a bad customer, but the salesperson set expectations too high and the eng team got crushed by the demands.
- andyjsong 4y ago
  Of course! There was a time when LOC was the measure of productivity just like the number of cold touches you make to convert to a discovery call. I've worked for public companies where you needed to make 300 cold calls a day and they are listed on NASDAQ. What I'm trying to say is that sales metrics has had time to evolve since 3500 BC. Meanwhile Comp Sci is still in it's infancy. The ironic part is that for an industry that is obsessed with data and metrics, engineers abhor any kind of metric to track performance because it's perceived more of an art. Meanwhile salespeople are under a microscope and are totally okay with it because if you're good, you're generally the highest paid person in the org.

valenterry 4y ago

> A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC What? For an Opportunity, it's usually pretty clear and very very easy to measure, how much the company gains from that and when. How do you measure the gains from a PR? If you can't than literally everything else is completely meaningless. Don't forget that PRs can also be net negative to the company.

kqr 4y ago
It's a myth that it's "very very easy" to measure how much the company gains from a sale. The base revenue is clear as day, yes. But then there's publicity, word-of-mouth, usually extra revenue streams, and the cost of the customer is often not at all clear until they've been onboarded. One of the big problems in most sales organisations I've seen is that they think that the base revenue is all that matters.
- valenterry 4y ago
  True, but still. Unless we talk about highly custom enterprise contracts or so, the unit economics is much easier. Maybe not very very easy, I take that one back, haha. But estimating the marketing impact per contract signed is still more or less a one time thing. Not so with PRs.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  This is a good point. The sale is not equal to net present value. However, at least it is quantifiable in some way and somewhat easy to incentivize for. Much easier than attempting to assign net present value to a patch.

kqr 4y ago

> If a salesperson does this, after 2 quarters of missing your quota, you’re fired. Doesn’t matter if you had monster quarters before that, if you’re not hitting your numbers, GTFO. Did I get it right that you think this is the right approach for dealing with your salespeople, that it improves long-term productivity of the organisation?

andyjsong 4y ago
It depends. But I'd challenge you to ask your own sales leader at your company what their policy is and their reasoning.

john_the_writer 4y ago

On this. There are two major issues with "missing shipping" 1. More often than not the feature or the dev that holds thing back. It's the unknown, or didn't think of side effects. Like walking the coast of California in 2 weeks. If you don't hit a river or bit of beach that's been eroded away, or a cliff, you're good. 2. As you said metric take a while to figure out. Lets say we give Comp Sci a 10th of the time to figure out metrics as we've had at sales. So.. we should be all set in say 500 years :)