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Nothing at a company is "non-user-facing", otherwise you wouldn't do it. If you're communicating the importance of some project or plan to people outside of you
by nerdponx 3y ago
Nothing at a company is "non-user-facing", otherwise you wouldn't do it. If you're communicating the importance of some project or plan to people outside of your domain, it's important to keep the focus on how this actually benefits the company.
However that's not the problem described in TFA. It was clear what the user-facing implications of not upgrading the line were, and management didn't care. Sometimes people aren't rational.
- macNchz 3y agoWhat I was getting at was the idea of time spent on things that aren’t directly and immediately able to be, say, put into a sales demo, but instead impact the customer a but more tangentially, which is also when communicating clearly about business impact is particularly important. I would also argue that companies do tons of genuinely non customer facing stuff with varying levels of justification, for better or worse. Regardless, who knows whether this was the case in the story being discussed, but it’s not unthinkable that this genre of communication breakdown was involved to some extent.
- nerdponx 3y agoMy point is that just about any justification for any business activity ends up being customer-related at some level. Example: Why do we want to spend money on Jetbrains licenses for developers? Because we want them to be happy, comfortable, and productive. And why do we want them to be happy, comfortable, and productive? Because they build stuff that customers want.