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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

#81

Post by hughredline »

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…

> DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions

That’s been my experience all my tears in industry.

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

#82

Post by nunez »

Very risky strategy with engineers that don't have good "customer presence" depending on the kind of sales calls they "ran." This is something I would expect product managers to do. I would say that this is more of a product management failure than anything else. Unless it's a super small early-stage startup, in which case all bets are off and I'd expect everyone to kind of do everything.

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

#83

Post by awkward »

jmuguy wrote: post #68

> The rewrite took 2 weeks. We removed 60% of features. Added a simple progress bar. Built Slack integration for questions. Created "done-for-you" workflows. > Our support tickets dropped 70%. If this isn't fake something is extremely wrong with this picture.

It sounds like it's a B2B SaaS product that's gone through multiple pivots with very weak guidance on product on every step.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but it's a very common way for things to go wrong.

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

#84

Post by supportengineer »

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…

This should be common knowledge

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

#86

Post by nunez »

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…

you're not wrong, but i don't think forcing engineers to take sales calls is the right move either. there's lots of soft skills involved in running a successful call that engineers aren't trained or even interviewed on.

(i'm definining "sales calls" as the initial discovery call before a demo or proof of concept is agreed upon. i would be okay with having engineers _ride along_ for complex presales demos, but even then, product should really be serving that role.)

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

#87

Post by neogodless »

hughredline wrote: post #81
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…

> DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions That’s been my experience all my tears in industry.

I, too, have had many, many tears in this industry.

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

#89

Post by nunez »

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.

What you're describing is customer success, which is almost always post-sales. Engineers working with customers post-sales is a great idea. *Pre*-sales is where it gets tricky.

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

#90

Post by GlassOwAter »

sillywabbit wrote: post #66
general1726 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or engineers are little bit full of themselves and know better how user should experience the product. If user is "holding the product wrong" it is a problem of a user and not a problem of stupid design, created by a person who knows in which order these buttons should be pressed. People around Desktop Linux could write a complete book about dismissing user's complaints. The moment you have stubborn engineer who know…

God forbid an engineer should have an opinion on UI/UX.

That’s the attitude he’s talking about!
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