[ajankovic]

It's not just developers. My friend works in the sales department and he hates it. Every functional request that he make has to go through the usual "agile" process and it's just blocked by the weeks of sprints that are trying to keep up with the increasing backlog.

Some of those requests are very important and will benefit with actual real monetary results, but he has to personally escalate it through hierarchy and force dev team to break their sprint rules and force them to work on it.

In other words he has to make them be agile by force.

[eldavido]

As a developer, it is highly upsetting to me when sales does this.

A well-functioning product development org has processes in place to decide what gets done first. These processes take into account tons of inputs including bug feedback, enhancement requests, potential for outages if something isn't fixed, long- and short-term competitive and strategic concerns, customer requests, and internally-sourced architecture requests.

Then some selfish jackass comes along (from whatever department) who just can't wait because WE NEED TO GET THIS DEAL, so the entire process is thrown out the window to satisfy the whims of one customer, who may not even be large, high-revenue, or strategically important, and the wrong works gets done.

Please, stop the madness. Don't go around the product team, and if you're in eng, please don't tolerate this bad behavior.

[douche]

Fuck those people. Sales that are that pathological are all kinds of broken.

[zzalpha]

Some of those requests are very important and will benefit with actual real monetary results

That has nothing to do with agile. That's a basic failure in product management, and would happen regardless of the dev methodology.

If those features really do have such a large business impact, they should be getting prioritized (hint: the backlog isn't a rigid, time sequenced FIFO).

If they're not, either the PO sucks, or the features aren't as important as the sales guy thinks relative to other items in the backlog.

[ebiester]

It sounds like your sales friend needs to be told "no" more often.

Because it turns out everyone is making those same requests and the product owners are putting "we'll put it on the backlog" as a soft no. A backlog needs to be shit that will actually happen.

Alternatively, the wrong things are prioritized. The backlog is not "first in first out." It's a "here are the next 5 most important things. Why is your special snowflake more important than that?"

[romanhn]

This is by design and it's a good thing. If every salesperson is allowed to drop high priority "but my client is asking for this NOW" work items on engineering, you'll end up in a tug-of-war of competing priorities from O(n) stakeholders who don't give a shit about planning or roadmap in order to make their sale. Been there, done that. A proper product owner can balance all such requests and figure out what actually is needed to move the product forward. Salespeople need to make a business case for getting their requests done. Potential monetary results alone is often not enough, for good reasons, to force a context switch in an engineering team.

[Zigurd]

This is how products and companies die.

[eldavido]

Having worked at a company with a lot of this that's now circling the drain, I can't disagree.