[haolez]

I know of a company that is huge in laser for physics and started like this in the 80s (through magazine catalogs).

They would list all kinds of lasers. When they got some offers for one of them, they'd sell it and schedule the delivery in 90 days. Then, they started the project from scratch. Crazy stuff and borderline legal :D

[magicalhippo]

We do something similar at work. Except usually the dev department doesn't know until handed the project from sales and so the project goals might be entirely unrealistic given the deadline.

What do you mean that feature doesn't exist? Well, I sold it to the customer, they have to go live in two weeks and their workflow depends on this feature.

[DowsingSpoon]

While I've fortunately never had this happen to me, I'd be tempted to say something like, "Wow. Well, I sure hope you don't get fired over this. Good luck. We'll scope it out and let you know how much time we'll need."

[tialaramex]

Having been on on the customer side it's frustrating how often the situation is: Me: "So, you got a bid which offers features A, B, C, and D we asked for, and you say it also has X and Y and hit our budget?" / Buyer: "Yes".

A week later. "OK, their install team says it can't technically do C yet, however there's an early 2026 preview scheduled which addresses most of C. The D feature isn't in the edition we have, our buyers are talking to their sales people and we may need to pay extra to unlock D. And you're correct that two other organisations in our industry confirm X is dogshit and you'd be better off without it but it can't be disabled. Still A does work, and we have filed bugs about the known defects with B so hopefully we can get those fixed"

Every time I buy a product as an ordinary consumer I marvel at how much worse my huge employer is at buying products than I am. I reckon if they were sent to the store to buy a whole roast chicken with a £20 note they'd come back with six expired chicken sandwiches and no change.

[roarcher]

> Every time I buy a product as an ordinary consumer I marvel at how much worse my huge employer is at buying products than I am.

It's the size of the deal that matters. Most of the consumer goods you buy are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No individual sale is worth the vendor forming a "relationship" with that customer or promising bespoke features. B2B sales are often large deals that require months of negotiation and may be worth millions. Bullshitting in order to land the deal is incentivized on both sides, to the point where both only have a fuzzy idea of what exactly is being bought and sold.

But consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases. When I buy a car, maybe I fail to mention the unreported fender bender my trade-in was in, and maybe the salesman tries to charge me $1200 to etch "anti-theft tracking numbers" on the new car's windows, citing some dubious statistics about vehicle recovery rates.

[QuantumNomad_]

> consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases

Or as I like to do, buying random things on AliExpress and Temu knowing full well that some of the things will not meet the expectations you’d have from the product listings.

Sometimes I’m lucky and the stuff is good. Sometimes I’m a little unlucky and it’s worse quality than I’d like.

At least I quickly learned to read carefully what was said to realize that what’s depicted is not exactly what’s being sold. Some sellers do this misleading trick where they have some amazing photo up front but there are either multiple variations of it or the thing being sold is only some component for that thing. I still sometimes see product reviews from other buyers that were upset that they didn’t get what they thought they were buying and I don’t blame them because it can be pretty misleading at times, but if you read carefully and look at all the pictures and check what the “color” or similar option dropdown says etc you will usually spot it when they are selling something different than what it might look like at first. So I haven’t had that kind of misfortune for years now. But sometimes you still get products that are lower quality than you were hoping for, even when the product listing was pretty accurate. Some kinds of bad quality is just not possible to judge unless you see the product in person.

[bityard]

Maybe they exist but I haven't worked in a company yet that wouldn't fire an engineer or manager for refusing to implement a feature that some salescritter already sold. One of them made the company money (on paper, sure) while the other is threatening to undo the deal. It's not hard to guess which one the c-suites would send packing first.

[dingnuts]

oh you agree to do it but you laugh, literally laugh, at their deadline. and you say, you can fire me but that's not going to get your software done on time. in fact it will delay it.

they shut up. it's done when it's done.

I've done this many, many times. Oh you promised it by the end of the week and didn't ask me? lol, that sounds like a YOU problem.

[com2kid]

The Whitehouse once called my team at Microsoft and asked for some features.

We said yes, we'd get right on it. :-D

We were all too stunned to have any real feedback.

[magicalhippo]

Fortunately it doesn't happen too often, and some can be attributed to our somewhat complex feature matrix that differs by regions due to reasons.

On the other hand, in our niche customers usually don't swap software providers often due to integration work needed.

When an opportunity arises, it's usually because the yearly license expires. So we got to either sell it now with a hard deadline in the near future, or wait 5+ years till next time they switch.

So that can lead to sales being a bit optimistic when making the pitch.

[ojosilva]

I've been on both ends of this workflow. Sales always wins.

"Wow. Well, I sure hope you don't get fired over this. Good luck. We'll scope it out and let you know how much time we'll need."

"We'll see."

The big-screen TV in the modern glass conference room showed the final slide: “Questions?”.

"I.. I'd like to add that this feature we sold is not in the product and we can't just go around adding features that Sales makes up out of the blue just... just to close a deal. I mean, we gotta plan these things, there's a procedure, we should get product involved..."

Head of Sales, interrupting: "Can't we, Jeff?"

Jeff, the middle-manager, shuffled his feet: "Uh. Yeah. Right. I think we shouldn't. Hey! Haste makes waste, that's what they say, right?"

Head of Sales: "Can't we Barbara?"

Barbara, the boss: "I don't know. Let me call Pradeep"

(Barbara presses the "huddle" button in Slack on her big iPhone. A few rings and a bored voice replies)

"Yeah?"

"Sorry to jump on you like this, Pradeep. Would you mind coming to meeting room seven for a second?"

Less than a minute later Pradeep walks in, his thick glasses casting a green hue over his eyes, his arrogant demeanor preceded him like a shadow.

"Pradeep, did you read the feature request I messaged you?"

"Yes."

"How fast can you do it"

"Just merged it this morning."

[LtWorf]

Ah you must work at my same company!

[ttoinou]

Some smart stealer was posting bikes of his neighbors online second hand marketplace and waited to get contacted for specific model to steal them. Genius evil

[nilamo]

A previous boss did this in the early 2000s. Put up a bunch of single page descriptions with "coming soon" labels, include an email subscription to "stay on top of news", turn on AdWords to get some traffic... and then start working on what people were actually interested in.

[prerok]

Isn't this just sort of market research for how to prioritize the roadmap? I think it was a great way to do so.

[SequoiaHope]

Yeah this seems like the kind of thing people would have advised me to do when I was trying to start startups around 2010. But I was too focused on engineering and had no head for the business side so I never tried it.

[pinkmuffinere]

Ya, I know this strategy under the name “smokescreen mvp”. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it is advocated in the lean startup. Personally I am a big supporter of the strategy. Many startups fail because _nobody cared about the problem_, and this is totally avoidable

[gundmc]

Engineering-to-Order! Not all that uncommon of a model in some industries, but problems arise when Sales doesn't have good communication with Engineering about what is actually possible for what price on what timelines.

[bitwize]

Kinda reminds me of how Swingline didn't actually sell red staplers -- until they realized there was a demand.

[joquarky]

Back in the 80s and 90s rhey would advertise products on TV with "6 to 8 weeks for delivery".

Now I wonder if they did this to batch up a manufacturing run once enough orders were received.

[james_marks]

Totally. You also get batch efficiencies shipping 10k orders in a day vs dribbling them out over weeks, and you can use sub-standard shipping methods that are cheaper because… the carriers themselves are also batching the work.

[cfn]

This is the story of all the niche software products out there. Put together a smoke and mirrors demo, get a customer, build the product.

[greesil]

Ah I loved that catalog