[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.