6 ms·

> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered

> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.

octo_t 12y ago
This is incredibly common behaviour amongst sales people. Or what is also common is 'oh, funny you should mention that, we have a team working on that feature as we speak'. 90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.
- SheepSlapper 12y ago
  As a developer, I've been on the receiving end of "we promised the client we could do this, and they've already paid us, so get to it" more times than I can count... it's my least favorite salesman trait, by far.
  - ovulator 12y ago
    And the salesman gets a nice commision from the sale while the developer gets to work an extra 20 hours that week at no extra pay.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      New rule: developers, let's demand 50% of the sales team's commission for contracts sold on promised features.
    - rwallace 12y ago
      While I'm not defending the practice of vaporware, it's not the root of the problem here. The root of the problem is that if you have a policy of working unpaid overtime, unless you are lucky in finding only wise or scrupulous employers, your life is going to be trashed. To you, it is completely irrelevant whether the reason your employer ordered you to trash your life was because the salesman sold vaporware, or because of the phase of the moon; the outcome for you is the same regardless of the reason the order was given. You have to change your policy of obeying such orders.
  - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
    Same here; the worst is when they want a feature that's technically impossible.
    - octo_t 12y ago
      its even worse when you're in the meeting with the client when the sales people say you've already got this feature and you're thinking "no, no we don't dear go this is going to take a massive database change and....."
  - aidenn0 12y ago
    That's not even remotely my least favorite, as at least salespeople who overpromise too much tend to get caught out. My least favorite is salespeople who give product away for free (including the support thereof), hurting the bottom line, since their commission is on gross.
  - dusing 12y ago
    We do this all the time for features on our roadmap, if a high level client wants to "sign up" and basically pay for the new feature we move it up in the roadmap.
matthewmacleod 12y ago
What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me. Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've worked for have, too – sales people are very happy to overstate the available features and capabilities of any product. From their perspective, a shoddy, rushed implementation to an unhappy client is still better than having them walk away from the purchase entirely.
- skriticos2 12y ago
  From my experience, big enterprise product company representatives like to do this: Question: Does your application has x, y and z feature and can be integrated in our process easily? Answer: Sure, all there. Just have to tweak a few settings in the GUI. Truth: We have a bare-bone product and a semi-documented API. Feel free to implement all the features you want and adapt it to your process. We can provide you professional services (for a price, of course).
- MadManE 12y ago
  This cannot be overstated. If you give the sales team any room or freedom, they will make your life hell trying to keep up with "features" that outdo everyone else just so they can get their commission check. They don't have to deal with anything beyond signing of the purchase, so they don't care that it sinks everyone else to get that purchase.
  - otterley 12y ago
    Salespeople who sell products by providing false information are committing fraud on behalf of the company and should be fired.
    - UVB-76 12y ago
      This is just how things work in a lot of industries. You promise the world to make a sale, then once you've signed, work frantically to make the vision you sold a reality. If you were open and honest, you wouldn't sell a thing. The only people who lose out are those who take salespeople on their word and don't get everything agreed in writing. Never take a salesperson on their word.
WettowelReactor 12y ago
Agreed. The fact that most business seem to lack basic ethics is not an excuse to do so as well.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
greenyoda 12y ago
It also puts employees under constant pressure, since every feature is already "late" as soon as implementation begins, and extraordinary effort is required on an ongoing basis just to keep the company from embarrassing itself. At the company I work for, executives and sales people frequently make "commitments" to our customers for features that don't yet exist. People who make commitments on my behalf without even mentioning them to me beforehand (let alone asking me if what they're promising is even possible to deliver) don't get my full respect.
- x0x0 12y ago
  I worked for a founder who did this all the time and it's incredibly stressful as an employee. It would be fine in the limited case where the features are fast and easy to implement: say two days' work at most. I enjoy my paychecks clearing every other week, and losing a sale over small amounts of effort is dumb, particularly since sales where relatively large (low hundreds of thousands of dollars). But this founder didn't know and frankly didn't care about that; he talked about features we'd just begun to do basic research on as if they existed. I'm being intentionally somewhat vague here, so it's hard to really relate the details, but in one case he discussed a feature (having to do with distributed markov chains) that not only didn't exist but, afaik, nobody in the world even understands how to do and is the subject of active research. Needless to say, not something that could be implemented in a couple days. Worse, we where talking to some phds who fucking understood the above, and they immediately started asking me how the fuck we did it! And yes, it often made us look like complete assholes in front of customers.
  - jrs235 12y ago
    I worked for a guy that did this too. Instead of me losing sleep over it, I put my job on the line (because if this was standard operating procedure then I would rather be unemployed...) and told him he needed to come clean with who he sold admitting he was at fault and not the developers/etc. If a sales person has to eat crow they quickly learn to avoid future crow eating. Things were much better after that.
  - tgflynn 12y ago
Swizec 12y ago
Two things: 1. In my limited experience with pitching/salesing when you say "Yeah I think we can probably build that" the customer/client will take it as "We already have this". There is no amount of rational talking and explaining you can put in place to prevent this. If they ask for something, and your answer is anything but an unequivocal "No." they will think you already have it. 2. Isn't the whole concept of MVP and lean basically going out to people and saying "We have this" then seeing if somebody pays, and if they do, making it?
- MadManE 12y ago
  My understanding of MVP is that you essentially sell a lack of features. Make something that does as little as possible that someone will buy, not selling something and then figuring out how to do it.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    Literally the first step described in Four Steps to the Epiphany is selling mockups. Mockups.
    - MadManE 12y ago
      Well, that's depressing. Thanks for the clarification.
- yxhuvud 12y ago
  1: "Yeah, we can build that. It will cost $TIME and will add an extra $$$ MEGABUCKS to the total cost". One basic technique is to keep track of the life time cost of sales, development, delivery and support/maintenance for all projects, and then measure the performance of salespeople based on both income and cost (as opposed to just income) makes them a lot more motivated to sell good solutions.
otterley 12y ago
It is also fraudulent and could lead to litigation against you. I have no sympathy for companies and people who do this.
zem 12y ago
as someone who headed the dev team in a startup where the ceo did this repeatedly, i have to say it's a huge mistake. it was very demoralising to the entire engineering side of the company; we felt that we were never given a chance to deliver a properly working product because we were always working round the clock and frantically adding half-baked features that had been used to close a sale.
billmalarky 12y ago
It's called vaperware and it's part of a lean strategy (that way you only build what people actually want). It's extremely common, in fact I believe New Relic was founded using this type of strategy. Take this with a grain of salt because this is an old passing memory of mine, but I believe Lew Cirne called up business owners and sold a bunch of them on the original new relic product before even developing it. I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying), if it is some sort of technology that you aren't sure is possible or not that is certainly different.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  "...I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying)" So the salesperson/founder needs to have a good enough model of how the software works so that they know if a feature is relatively easy to provide, or if as another poster commented, it would require say a major change in a database design. I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying) When I was being sold to, I developed a good ear for phrases like 'in development' or 'that is just a custom report'. We used put it all in writing &c.
marcosdumay 12y ago
As somebody who has been on the developer side of that, I'd say that it depends on the feature, and on the available time. If you are sure that it's viable (as I'm assuming the author was), why not? I'd still prefer to frame it as "that's on our roadmap, and will be done by the time we close the contract", but then, there's little practical difference.
e15ctr0n 12y ago
You are referring to a phenomenon known as vaporware [0]. Microsoft was notorious for using this strategy of pre-announcing features in order to kill smaller competitors from developing them, afraid that they won't be able to compete with the 800-pound gorilla [1]. Lots of other companies starting copying this tactic, so much so that tech industry publications like Wired started bringing out annual lists of vaporware [2]. Eventually the Justice Department filed lawsuit against Microsoft [3]. Amicus is just following a long, time-honored tradition. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware [1] http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/24/business/information-technology-the-executive-computer.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/24/business/information-techn... [2] http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/01/66195?currentPage=all http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/01/6619... [3] http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.h...

octo_t 12y ago

This is incredibly common behaviour amongst sales people. Or what is also common is 'oh, funny you should mention that, we have a team working on that feature as we speak'. 90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.

SheepSlapper 12y ago
As a developer, I've been on the receiving end of "we promised the client we could do this, and they've already paid us, so get to it" more times than I can count... it's my least favorite salesman trait, by far.
- ovulator 12y ago
  And the salesman gets a nice commision from the sale while the developer gets to work an extra 20 hours that week at no extra pay.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    New rule: developers, let's demand 50% of the sales team's commission for contracts sold on promised features.
  - rwallace 12y ago
    While I'm not defending the practice of vaporware, it's not the root of the problem here. The root of the problem is that if you have a policy of working unpaid overtime, unless you are lucky in finding only wise or scrupulous employers, your life is going to be trashed. To you, it is completely irrelevant whether the reason your employer ordered you to trash your life was because the salesman sold vaporware, or because of the phase of the moon; the outcome for you is the same regardless of the reason the order was given. You have to change your policy of obeying such orders.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  Same here; the worst is when they want a feature that's technically impossible.
  - octo_t 12y ago
    its even worse when you're in the meeting with the client when the sales people say you've already got this feature and you're thinking "no, no we don't dear go this is going to take a massive database change and....."
- aidenn0 12y ago
  That's not even remotely my least favorite, as at least salespeople who overpromise too much tend to get caught out. My least favorite is salespeople who give product away for free (including the support thereof), hurting the bottom line, since their commission is on gross.
- dusing 12y ago
  We do this all the time for features on our roadmap, if a high level client wants to "sign up" and basically pay for the new feature we move it up in the roadmap.

matthewmacleod 12y ago

What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me. Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've worked for have, too – sales people are very happy to overstate the available features and capabilities of any product. From their perspective, a shoddy, rushed implementation to an unhappy client is still better than having them walk away from the purchase entirely.

skriticos2 12y ago
From my experience, big enterprise product company representatives like to do this: Question: Does your application has x, y and z feature and can be integrated in our process easily? Answer: Sure, all there. Just have to tweak a few settings in the GUI. Truth: We have a bare-bone product and a semi-documented API. Feel free to implement all the features you want and adapt it to your process. We can provide you professional services (for a price, of course).
MadManE 12y ago
This cannot be overstated. If you give the sales team any room or freedom, they will make your life hell trying to keep up with "features" that outdo everyone else just so they can get their commission check. They don't have to deal with anything beyond signing of the purchase, so they don't care that it sinks everyone else to get that purchase.
- otterley 12y ago
  Salespeople who sell products by providing false information are committing fraud on behalf of the company and should be fired.
  - UVB-76 12y ago
    This is just how things work in a lot of industries. You promise the world to make a sale, then once you've signed, work frantically to make the vision you sold a reality. If you were open and honest, you wouldn't sell a thing. The only people who lose out are those who take salespeople on their word and don't get everything agreed in writing. Never take a salesperson on their word.

WettowelReactor 12y ago

Agreed. The fact that most business seem to lack basic ethics is not an excuse to do so as well.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

greenyoda 12y ago

It also puts employees under constant pressure, since every feature is already "late" as soon as implementation begins, and extraordinary effort is required on an ongoing basis just to keep the company from embarrassing itself. At the company I work for, executives and sales people frequently make "commitments" to our customers for features that don't yet exist. People who make commitments on my behalf without even mentioning them to me beforehand (let alone asking me if what they're promising is even possible to deliver) don't get my full respect.

x0x0 12y ago
I worked for a founder who did this all the time and it's incredibly stressful as an employee. It would be fine in the limited case where the features are fast and easy to implement: say two days' work at most. I enjoy my paychecks clearing every other week, and losing a sale over small amounts of effort is dumb, particularly since sales where relatively large (low hundreds of thousands of dollars). But this founder didn't know and frankly didn't care about that; he talked about features we'd just begun to do basic research on as if they existed. I'm being intentionally somewhat vague here, so it's hard to really relate the details, but in one case he discussed a feature (having to do with distributed markov chains) that not only didn't exist but, afaik, nobody in the world even understands how to do and is the subject of active research. Needless to say, not something that could be implemented in a couple days. Worse, we where talking to some phds who fucking understood the above, and they immediately started asking me how the fuck we did it! And yes, it often made us look like complete assholes in front of customers.
- jrs235 12y ago
  I worked for a guy that did this too. Instead of me losing sleep over it, I put my job on the line (because if this was standard operating procedure then I would rather be unemployed...) and told him he needed to come clean with who he sold admitting he was at fault and not the developers/etc. If a sales person has to eat crow they quickly learn to avoid future crow eating. Things were much better after that.
- tgflynn 12y ago

Swizec 12y ago

Two things: 1. In my limited experience with pitching/salesing when you say "Yeah I think we can probably build that" the customer/client will take it as "We already have this". There is no amount of rational talking and explaining you can put in place to prevent this. If they ask for something, and your answer is anything but an unequivocal "No." they will think you already have it. 2. Isn't the whole concept of MVP and lean basically going out to people and saying "We have this" then seeing if somebody pays, and if they do, making it?

MadManE 12y ago
My understanding of MVP is that you essentially sell a lack of features. Make something that does as little as possible that someone will buy, not selling something and then figuring out how to do it.
- Swizec 12y ago
  Literally the first step described in Four Steps to the Epiphany is selling mockups. Mockups.
  - MadManE 12y ago
    Well, that's depressing. Thanks for the clarification.
yxhuvud 12y ago
1: "Yeah, we can build that. It will cost $TIME and will add an extra $$$ MEGABUCKS to the total cost". One basic technique is to keep track of the life time cost of sales, development, delivery and support/maintenance for all projects, and then measure the performance of salespeople based on both income and cost (as opposed to just income) makes them a lot more motivated to sell good solutions.

otterley 12y ago

It is also fraudulent and could lead to litigation against you. I have no sympathy for companies and people who do this.

zem 12y ago

as someone who headed the dev team in a startup where the ceo did this repeatedly, i have to say it's a huge mistake. it was very demoralising to the entire engineering side of the company; we felt that we were never given a chance to deliver a properly working product because we were always working round the clock and frantically adding half-baked features that had been used to close a sale.

billmalarky 12y ago

It's called vaperware and it's part of a lean strategy (that way you only build what people actually want). It's extremely common, in fact I believe New Relic was founded using this type of strategy. Take this with a grain of salt because this is an old passing memory of mine, but I believe Lew Cirne called up business owners and sold a bunch of them on the original new relic product before even developing it. I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying), if it is some sort of technology that you aren't sure is possible or not that is certainly different.

keithpeter 12y ago
"...I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying)" So the salesperson/founder needs to have a good enough model of how the software works so that they know if a feature is relatively easy to provide, or if as another poster commented, it would require say a major change in a database design. I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying) When I was being sold to, I developed a good ear for phrases like 'in development' or 'that is just a custom report'. We used put it all in writing &c.

marcosdumay 12y ago

As somebody who has been on the developer side of that, I'd say that it depends on the feature, and on the available time. If you are sure that it's viable (as I'm assuming the author was), why not? I'd still prefer to frame it as "that's on our roadmap, and will be done by the time we close the contract", but then, there's little practical difference.

e15ctr0n 12y ago

You are referring to a phenomenon known as vaporware [0]. Microsoft was notorious for using this strategy of pre-announcing features in order to kill smaller competitors from developing them, afraid that they won't be able to compete with the 800-pound gorilla [1]. Lots of other companies starting copying this tactic, so much so that tech industry publications like Wired started bringing out annual lists of vaporware [2]. Eventually the Justice Department filed lawsuit against Microsoft [3]. Amicus is just following a long, time-honored tradition. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware [1] http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/24/business/information-technology-the-executive-computer.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/24/business/information-techn... [2] http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/01/66195?currentPage=all http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/01/6619... [3] http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.h...