I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform • Hacker News Board

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#31

Post by sharpy » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

bnug wrote: post #18

dcastonguay wrote: post #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/ac…

That could be the case, but I work in a mechanical engineering group as the only person on the team who can write code or automate things with it. We're in a large corporation with a sizeable IT support group that builds a decent chunk of the software in-house, and our team views much of it as terrible. So, I've rewritten applications or supplemented the "terrible" but irreplaceable software with tools to make our jo…

100% agree with this take. I work in observability space. We use our own product to monitor our services, and being a daily user of the product helps us make it better. Our customers also agree. We get opportunity to talk to our customers doing product demos at conferences, etc, and all the feedback I have gotten is that they love the product! But wish it was cheaper.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#32

Post by IOT_Apprentice » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

Have every engineer to install their product at a customer site, this should be able be done remotely and use the product to load key data and update. Have your engineers take support calls.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#33

Post by perrygeo » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:06 PM UTC

dcastonguay wrote: post #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/ac…

Yep, notice there was no mention at all about why the original software was so ill-designed in the first place. Not even a curiosity as to why. Your conclusion is more valid, though I wouldn't necessarily place the blame on the PM. Agile/Scrum rituals, where blame is diffused and developers are forced to sprint quickly through poorly-designed tickets, yields poorly-designed software. Who could have guessed? Feels like a systematic problem with the "modern" bloated software organization.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#34

Post by gedy » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

dcastonguay wrote: post #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/ac…

I wonder if LLMs might be replacing these type of PM jobs where they gather up feedback (usually it's mostly in text form anyways), and translate and summarize so engineers can cut out some noise and confusion from PMs.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#35

Post by PaulKeeble » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:10 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #19

All the negative responses. I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product. And it might be something silly like their coworker added something they didn't know about and the UI is now confusing. Could even be the website started proclaiming something that didn't align well with the product. Another factor is that the [product -> PM -> bug system -> engineer -> fix -> QA -> produ…

There are myriad of ways to get this wrong and I have seen them all happen:

- force all the communications with the users through Project Managers or Product Owners. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they are terrible.

- The customers refuse to talk to the developers and so they are forced to interpret the users managers requirements without any further input.

- The developers just want to write code and refuse to meet the customer forcing all communication through their product manager or bug tracker.

- I have seen a couple of times where commercial software platforms were used the technology can get in the way, they are limited in the types of modifications and customisations that can be applied and this can make some workflows really awful.

There is always a disconnect somewhere, someone blocking a conversation happening and it can be the customer, a middle man or the developers causing it, often its all three to get a really dysfunctional system or the solution has been chosen before any developers or users really got into the details and its the wrong choice.

There are a lot of ways to make systems that aren't very good for the users.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#36

Post by wredcoll » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

I don't know if this scales, but I ask for this at every company I work for and none of them agree. It frustrates.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#37

Post by 9rx » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:13 PM UTC

PaulRobinson wrote: post #26

dcastonguay wrote: post #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/ac…

Most engineers turn up at meetings with product managers with two major problems: 1. They assume they know more than everyone else. Got a guy who has had a problem for 5 years and tried 20 different solutions? The engineers will spend 10 minutes thinking about it, come up with a solution (that won't work, but they insist it will) and dismiss the problem as "trivial", and think the guy is an idiot. I've done it myself…

> I can not understate how hard it is to get engineers to read a scope document, ...

Ironically, it is hard because it doesn't consider the user. Scope documents likely seem reasonable for the author living in their own little bubble, dismissing it as something "trivial", but if they actually had to use it like those on the receiving end they would soon realize how horrid and ill-conceived it is. Much like was learned in the original link, once you stop with the bad practices, things become much easier.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#38

Post by GabeIsko » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:17 PM UTC

I have been on the other side of this where engineers end up just being a technical support team, and are competed over to directly support accounts, and then there ends up being a plethora of hot fixes and custom solutions per customer. There is a ton of technical debt, because non of this stuff is tested properly and there are regressions all over the place. The whole thing goes under after a competitor, with their properly invested engineering resources makes a better and fully featured product than you.

To me, this screams a real failure of product management. They can't communicate the needs of their customer to their engineers or push back against them? Having engineers take sales calls is not going to scale when you have an actually mature base of customers.

If this product manager really wants Engineers to take sales calls, the Engineers need to earn part of the commission on the accounts. That is the only fair way to do this. I would never take a sales call without part of my compensation being commissions based.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#39

Post by snarf21 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

pseudocomposer wrote: post #17

At my company, as developers, we rotate taking support tickets and working directly with customers on the issues our (very capable) support team can’t handle. We and our customers are both very happy with the results.

Yeah, this drives value for almost all roles. No need for a separate focus group when you can ask the people who are already using and/or paying for your product.

Re: I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

#40

Post by hobs » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

sharpy wrote: post #31

bnug wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be the case, but I work in a mechanical engineering group as the only person on the team who can write code or automate things with it. We're in a large corporation with a sizeable IT support group that builds a decent chunk of the software in-house, and our team views much of it as terrible. So, I've rewritten applications or supplemented the "terrible" but irreplaceable software with tools to make our jo…

100% agree with this take. I work in observability space. We use our own product to monitor our services, and being a daily user of the product helps us make it better. Our customers also agree. We get opportunity to talk to our customers doing product demos at conferences, etc, and all the feedback I have gotten is that they love the product! But wish it was cheaper.

How to say datadog with more words.