[himynameisdom]

I've ran into this with teams before. I think it's critical to ask ourselves "Who really are our stakeholders?". More often than not, the answer boiled down to a.) our customers and b.) our sponsors. If someone from sales, marketing, support, infra, or anywhere else lobbies for anything that'll turn into work, we work with our PO to make sure this is something the product team (customer by proxy) or sponsor(s) really think are important.

Time and time again we've butt heads with the sales team because they promise the world to one or two leads before checking back in with reality. Those interactions are met with checking in with stakeholders to validate assumptions. we gained the support of our executive sponsor or customers who are actually paying for the product to be built. Asking that question insulates us from greasing internal squeaky wheels.

[hinkley]

If the sale is easy it’s because the lead thinks like your existing customers. If the sale is hard, it’s because they don’t.

Any feature you use to entice a new customer isn’t necessarily going to please your existing base. It might, as someone else suggested, actually be a considered a liability.

So the idea of building a new expensive feature, or a new feature in an expensive way, is suspicious. There’s no guarantee you can amortize that cost across all of your customers. And the times we really butted heads with sales? The features cost us more than the value of the sale, reducing margins.

But I suppose that’s the sort of metric dysfunction you invite in when you measure salespeople by sales.