[ukulele]

> Tip: Your marketing and sales teams should never be allowed to discuss features “in the pipeline”

Probably unpopular here, but this is a misguided, engineer-centric view of a business. Sales & marketing should absolutely have some leeway on unreleased features, as they have very close relationships with customers and can get early feedback in the realest way possible: "Will the customer pay for it?" Cutting off this avenue is popular for engineers (myself included) but not necessarily good for the long term health of a business.

[dkyc]

I think this is meant in another way: sales and marketing should never discuss future features with potential customers. Meaning, they should not try to win deals by promising features not yet rolled out, rather than not being involved in internal priorization discussions.

I happen to agree with the author to an extent. Selling future things rather than what's presently available makes sales a lot easier (which is why reps are often eager to do it), but the true value is created when sales sells what is already there. My father always put it this way: You have to sell what you have.

[ukulele]

This approach is cutting off a major strategic artery. Sales & marketing can do much more than just pushing what they're given; they should be a valuable pulse on the customer, and the truest feedback you can get for an upcoming feature is whether or not someone will pay you for it.

Particularly for larger or more advanced features, it makes much more sense to run engineering partly in parallel with sales & marketing (with feedback between the two) rather than in serial. Product and innovation cycles in the company are much tighter that way, and more accurate.

[isostatic]

Sure, but the conversation should be

Customer: "We want your product to do $FEATURE, there's nothing else that does it / other products that do it have these problems" Sales: "Thanks, we'll have a look at that and see if it's possible in the future"

or

When many customers want $FEATURE, it's something to consider

What shouldn't happen is

Sales: "Buy this product, it's great, and in the future it will have $FEATURE" Customer: "Great, we want $FEATURE, when will it be ready"

[daurnimator]

Contrarily, large customers often want to know what your roadmap is like: they want to be assured that your company/product is moving in the same direction that they are. Sales and marketing solve this by mentioning things in the pipeline. Without knowledge of what's coming up you'll fail to close a huge number of deals.

[dagw]

I guess it depends a lot on what kind of software you're selling. I used to work at a place that did very niche enterprise products, and if we got 10 new customers in a year that was a really great year. For a large enough potential contract we'd add almost whatever you asked for.

[tetha]

I am perfectly happy for sales to have an input into my priorization of my engineering team. Viewing sales, marketing, customer project management as an enemy is not productive.

Within a year or so, I've had a couple of requests of 'Ok sales is offering X, but honestly, we might order X like 18 more times, and each X might be 12 times bigger than the last X.' Scary. Sure. But you know what? Those were big customers. I went with my team, I made a big plan which included a bunch of technical debt cleanup, and refactoring things towards a cleaner structure for their need and gave sales that as a pitch, and also kinda included whatever they wanted to pay us for as a benefit. We've been paid gold to clean up our code, I tell you. And a number of small customers later, we're just making money off of that.

Walls don't just exist between Dev and Ops, guys.

[stctgion]

I have witnessed the case where whole products were created to fill gaps in sales promises on the threat of law suits. It's not a great way to do business, both Dev and the customer end up upset.

[ramses0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward-looking_statement

[pfarnsworth]

No, I completely disagree.

They should have input (ie. ability to make suggestions) but should no say. The Product Manager, who is in theory supposed to have all the metrics and has talked to all the customers, should be the one making the INFORMED decision based on DATA.

Sales is motivated by making the sale. Period, end of story. They want the sale because it makes them money. There's nothing wrong with that because that is exactly their job description, but it biases their decisions. Its their customer, and they want whatever that specific customer wants because it affects their salary. That's not healthy for the company.

The product manager should have the freedom to make decisions based on what is best for the company and for the large collections of customers. If they need to change the roadmap, which happens OFTEN in real life, they should do that because it's healthy for the company. They shouldn't be held to a feature because some salesperson promised it to a customer. That's how product strategy gets fucked up.

[ukulele]

> They shouldn't be held to a feature because some salesperson promised it to a customer.

This is taking the most extreme end of the spectrum as a baseline, and suggesting the polar opposite (sales & marketing get no leeway) as a response. There are benefits in the middle of these two extremes, where you can have sales & marketing discussing potential features and also have a well defined strategy from PMs.