I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
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Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#2This is an excellent strategy for smaller startups, where every individual contributor needs to have an understanding of the customer's needs, in order to develop an understanding of what kind of product must be built. I have much more success in projects where I deeply understand the product requirements (because I am involved in defining them), than those where the product requirements are "handed" to me and I just have to implement something that satisfies them.
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#3This is an excellent strategy for smaller startups, where every individual contributor needs to have an understanding of the customer's needs, in order to develop an understanding of what kind of product must be built. I have much more success in projects where I deeply understand the product requirements (because I am involved in defining them), than those where the product requirements are "handed" to me and I just…
Are you saying that you follow directions better because you wrote them... or that you are just ending up with a better UX because of your involvement?
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#4All this says to me is that they have no technical product/program management in place to actually do what is described.
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#5> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.
I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#6This is an excellent strategy for smaller startups, where every individual contributor needs to have an understanding of the customer's needs, in order to develop an understanding of what kind of product must be built. I have much more success in projects where I deeply understand the product requirements (because I am involved in defining them), than those where the product requirements are "handed" to me and I just…
Are you saying that you follow directions better because you wrote them... or that you are just ending up with a better UX because of your involvement?
Human communication is incredibly lossy (sometimes intentionally), plus humans will try to fill in gaps with assumed information. The more people you cut out between the message sender and the receiver, the more likely the message is to still be intact.
The kindergarten game of telephone is the perfect demonstration. You only end up with distorted messages if you have many players between the sender and the receiver. If you play telephone with 2 people, you end up with a boring game where any mistakes in communication are immediately resolved.
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#7> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product. I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/ac…
Many such cases of employees adding negative value.
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#8Dogfooding works
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#9Thankfully the comments agree that OP was the problem all along.
Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform
#10> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product. I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/ac…
-10x employees DO exist!