[scarface_74]

I’ve found that I like the thrill of designing a project as I get older. But not building. By design I don’t mean UI - which I suck at.

I have experience up and down the stack from requirements analysis and pre-sales, enough project management to get by, back end development, database, cloud architecture and “DevOps” [sic] and creating deployment pipelines. I’m not bragging, I’m just old (50).

I would have to hire someone to do any front end work except ironically hosted call centers.

I can do all that myself for a large project and for smaller projects I could simplify the “DevOps” portion. But knowing the work involved, I would rather lead a team at this point in my life and work with the “business”, project managers and people who want to be heads down.

Honestly though, the one thing I wouldn’t be good at anyway is marketing and sales and that’s the most important part of getting a project off the ground.

[dboreham]

> wouldn’t be good at anyway is marketing and sales

Shift perspective: Consider these things to be an optimization problem. People buying your thing is the output from some undefined function. You get to supply inputs to that function. Now sales and marketing is revealed as being about modeling that undefined function such that you can pick more optimal inputs thereby improving the output. Now traverse the gradient.

[scarface_74]

While I’m not interested in marketing, my focus over the next year will be to get better at sales. One of my best friends is in technical sales and he gave me a few books to read.

I consider marketing, broad based brand awareness and “sales” to be more one on one. Of course I’m talking B2B.

Context: I’m a “staff” cloud consultant at a 3rd party consulting firm and was previously a mid level cloud consultant (L5) working directly ar AWS (ProServe). I just got into consulting four years ago from hands on keyboard development + cloud architecture at smallish product companies. I’m really new to this.

Currently, when I come into a project, I already know from a thousand foot view what the customer wants - the business problem they are trying to solve or the opportunity they are going after since sales has already spoken to them and I’ve spoken to sales.

My job is to get them there (well now to lead a team) and to convince them that the solution I present to them is the right one. But my job is still just to convince the decision makers. Sales handles talking to the people who control the purse strings.

My next goal is to convince clients they need something that they didn’t know they needed instead of convincing them that we are the people that can help them execute on an initiative they already know they want.

Hopefully moving closer to the customer will provide some protection against software development getting commoditized to cheaper places (more likely) or AI (less likely)

[TeMPOraL]

Don't forget the constraints: are you willing to bullshit people a bit to get them incited, because you know it'll be a good, win-win deal for both sides, but they're dismissing it prematurely? What if you're not exactly sure if it'll be a win-win for them? Are you willing to still bullshit them a bit, assuming they're not idiots and they'll do the math on their end - so what you're doing is just forcing them to consider your proposal seriously? Are you okay to keep up the pressure, transfer all responsibility for the choice to your customers? Are you willing to lie?

I'm reluctant to try and follow the gradient because I'm convinced it quickly leads to abandoning the ethical constraints, and I don't want to become such a person.

[scarface_74]

I believe in Steven Covy’s idea of “win/win/no deal”. If it isn’t the case where both would walk away better than before, don’t do the deal. It’s not even necessarily about ethics. It’s more about reputational risk.

As shitty as Amazon is as employer, marketplace selling fake crap, etc, I can tell you that AWS is very customer focused and everyone that is customer facing is told to put the customer first even internally and don’t sell them something more expensive than needed, meet them where they are, be willing to work with hybrid environments, etc. I know both the shittiness as employer and how well they treat thier customers - I was customer facing.

I’ve worked for two third party cloud consulting companies since then and I can say there is nothing I’ve heard from management on how to treat customers that would be a bad look if it got out.