4 ms·

This article seems to be one big exercise in "false dichotomy" - the world is EITHER "sales guys are always right" or "engineers are always right"; the world is

by corry 13y ago

This article seems to be one big exercise in "false dichotomy" - the world is EITHER "sales guys are always right" or "engineers are always right"; the world is EITHER "engineers need sales guys more" or vice versa; the world is EITHER "the sales guy is right about feature x" or "the engineer is right about feature x". Startups and customer development (a la Steve Blank or PG) is messy by nature. That's the whole art of a startup - balancing your own vision for the technology with the market demand and other forces. Both hands are needed to wash each other. So even a small startup should have a robust Product Management function/group/team that has a leg both in the Customer's world and the Engineer's world. What's odd about this post is that the company is apparently targeted at Product Managers... but reads like its from a world in which the brilliant-and-precious engineers only ever deal directly with horrible sales ogres. If I was a product manager in the market for a tool like this, I would hope my software vendor had a more nuanced view of how customer/technology teams should interact. My $0.02!

k1w1 13y ago
I don't think the article is setting up a dichotomy at all - there is no "sales" or "engineers" there. It is more about the mismatch in communication that often happens between sales and engineering teams (and ones in bigger companies at that). Each team is trying to get the other to do what they want.
mtrimpe 13y ago
The article is also the first of it's kind I've seen that gives salespeople comprehensible and actionable advice on how to improve. If they're salespeople worth their salt they'll be able to help leverage this newfound understanding to better sell their feature requests. I do agree that ideally this nuggets of wisdom would not have been hidden in such a ranty article though. P.S. Their equivalent post aimed at product managers is at http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissing-off-the-engineers/ http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissi...
- notahacker 13y ago
  If salespeople are worth their salt and working for a software company, this isn't "newfound understanding". On the contrary, they've learned the hard way never to count on a deal closing because of a particular feature and never to promise something will be coming in the next cycle if they've got to deal with that customer again. They're well aware prospective customers might have reasons for not buying other than feature requests because their job performance is as dependent on being able to identify what customers actually mean as developers' performance is dependent on ability to write code. If they're worth their salt they're not skewed by optimism around one deal (unless they're in really high-ticket sales, in which case they've probably got dedicated engineers allocated to that deal anyway) and having talked to far more clients and prospective clients than all the engineers and product managers put together are probably actually in a far better position to prioritise features in terms of potential revenue to be earned/lost by the company. Needless to say, the engineers and PM have far more grasp of the difficulty of implementing the feature. That's why they need to compare notes.
- corry 13y ago
  Good points, and thanks for the other link. I'd disagree that it gives much (any?) actionable advice to real sales people since it's such a caricature-driven piece. It's anecdotal, but of the dozen sales and product guys I've worked with or managed maybe one (the worst one?) truly fits one of the caricatures. It's picking on easy stereotypes (cocky sales guy, excitable PM). I also think it offers some wrong advice - e.g. it's not the salesperson job to vet a new potential feature across a whole market segment. But that's a different discussion.. I get it now - their brand is about being aggressively pro-engineer, and they're making tools for disgruntled engineers that have bad sales teams and/or bad product managers. Perfect articles for that audience - just not for me. :)

by corry 13y ago

k1w1 13y ago

I don't think the article is setting up a dichotomy at all - there is no "sales" or "engineers" there. It is more about the mismatch in communication that often happens between sales and engineering teams (and ones in bigger companies at that). Each team is trying to get the other to do what they want.

mtrimpe 13y ago

The article is also the first of it's kind I've seen that gives salespeople comprehensible and actionable advice on how to improve. If they're salespeople worth their salt they'll be able to help leverage this newfound understanding to better sell their feature requests. I do agree that ideally this nuggets of wisdom would not have been hidden in such a ranty article though. P.S. Their equivalent post aimed at product managers is at http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissing-off-the-engineers/ http://blog.aha.io/index.php/hey-product-managers-stop-pissi...

notahacker 13y ago
If salespeople are worth their salt and working for a software company, this isn't "newfound understanding". On the contrary, they've learned the hard way never to count on a deal closing because of a particular feature and never to promise something will be coming in the next cycle if they've got to deal with that customer again. They're well aware prospective customers might have reasons for not buying other than feature requests because their job performance is as dependent on being able to identify what customers actually mean as developers' performance is dependent on ability to write code. If they're worth their salt they're not skewed by optimism around one deal (unless they're in really high-ticket sales, in which case they've probably got dedicated engineers allocated to that deal anyway) and having talked to far more clients and prospective clients than all the engineers and product managers put together are probably actually in a far better position to prioritise features in terms of potential revenue to be earned/lost by the company. Needless to say, the engineers and PM have far more grasp of the difficulty of implementing the feature. That's why they need to compare notes.
corry 13y ago
Good points, and thanks for the other link. I'd disagree that it gives much (any?) actionable advice to real sales people since it's such a caricature-driven piece. It's anecdotal, but of the dozen sales and product guys I've worked with or managed maybe one (the worst one?) truly fits one of the caricatures. It's picking on easy stereotypes (cocky sales guy, excitable PM). I also think it offers some wrong advice - e.g. it's not the salesperson job to vet a new potential feature across a whole market segment. But that's a different discussion.. I get it now - their brand is about being aggressively pro-engineer, and they're making tools for disgruntled engineers that have bad sales teams and/or bad product managers. Perfect articles for that audience - just not for me. :)