[polote]

> the key thing a product manager has to do is get out of the building.

Well, no, that's the sales job. First being a product manager is different in every company. And second there is a lot of differences depending of the type of business you are working in.

For example if you work in Saas b2b enterprise you can easily be a very good product manager and almost never meet the customers nor the users [1], because that's not what is important for the business.

On the contrary if you work in Saas b2c, talking (or doing surveys) to customers is crucial. So I would say that your advice apply well to B2C, in which there is no sales people

[1] https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterp...

[ako]

No, sales goes to the customer when you have a product to sell. The product manager need to go to the customer to understand what they need, and what product needs to be created.

[mathattack]

I would say 1 salesperson in 20 has the ability, interest and influence to alter a product roadmap. The other 19 exist because of their competitive drive and ability to bang their head against a wall without losing enthusiasm.

[polote]

In my experience 100% of salespeople will try to influence the product roadmap if it means they can sign a new deal

[mathattack]

Yes. “What can I promise on the roadmap to close this deal?” is very different than “What is best for the roadmap?”

You can’t trust a salesperson to think about the broader good when half their comp is tied to specific deals.

[ako]

Usually any impact a salesperson has over the product roadmap is too slow to have any impact on the sales opportunity.

Salespeople usually have more influence on the customers than on the roadmap, so they're better of trying to influence the decision making of the customer, than the product.

Salespeople focus on their sales targets, trying to change a product roadmap is not a very effective way to reach short term targets.

Obviously, a product manager should reach out to sales to try and understand their perspective on the product and the customer needs.

[ryandrake]

Depends on the company. I worked for a small company that was a real clown show. Sales would come down to the engineering area and say things like "I just closed a huuuuuuge sale for the company. We need a product that does A, B, and C, now so we can deliver it!" And, that became engineering's scope for the next 4 weeks...

[mongol]

Yes small companies commonly works like this. Basically, they hustle sales and the development team needs to cover for them.

[quadrifoliate]

Hey, I also worked at this company! (and left after 6 months)

[mathattack]

I’ve been at similar though 4 weeks would have been generous.

[ryandrake]

It would be 4 weeks because Sales told the customer that A, B, and C were already part of the product.

[notahacker]

If your product is B2B enterprise then your end users' delight at your UX might not matter very much, but you definitely want to understand the decision makers' interest in getting additional reporting/auditing tools and how much value [if any] they get from their staff being more accurate in using the tool...

[polote]

The issue is most of the time the decision maker has no clue about that. In B2B enterprise the product is not a big part of the decision to buy or not.

[notahacker]

The decision maker is usually someone in the C-suite or a little below it who cares very much about whether the system gives them the reports they asked for, whether it ticks all the boxes on the operations plan someone drew up for them, whether middle management are frequently complaining about errors, how much resource is needed to switch from service Y etc.

That's a different product focus from the end user (who probably finds the new operations checkboxes demanded by the decision maker a horrible pain) and instead of actually using it, their perception will be shaped by middle management feedback and some claims made by the enterprise salesperson about how much money their business can save from staff being able to complete X faster or Y being shared, but it very much is a product based decision. Otherwise the lowest bidder (or at least the lowest bidder with an SLA) or incumbent would win every time.

[gk1]

This is an outdated stereotype about enterprise buyers.