[mackman]

As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.

[xnorswap]

The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion.

It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter.

You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise your time was given away free to land a deal. Sometimes a deal that fell through anyway.

[ryandrake]

This is one of the things I try to suss out when I interview somewhere. Do you have a product team (or at least someone in leadership) with a stable requirements vision, or do you just haphazardly develop based on whoever your sales team last talked to. Having a stable roadmap is an absolute requirement for me. I may not agree with the roadmap or priorities, but I'd rather have them than not have them.

I've worked in both types of companies, and the ones where sales dictated what we worked on this week were universally awful.

[tnolet]

Even if you weed out the willy nilly stuff, you will bump into Enterprise users that are actually correct.

They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.

[polishdude20]

I worked at a place that did it a third way: The CEO had a product vision that changed every month.

[data-ottawa]

I don’t mind this as long as the sales team and management allow the correct amount of time to build it in a maintainable way.

The reality is I only get paid because of those deals, and the post deal tech-debt sprint never happens.

So the work has to get done and if sales doesn’t give time for it to be done properly then in 3-6 months velocity will drop and the sales pipeline will dry up.

Any company that can’t understand that is not a long term company I want to work at.

[nradov]

It really depends on the industry. In a narrow vertical market with only a limited number of large customers, the vendors pretty much have to roll over and do whatever the customers demand regardless of product vision. Give the customers what they want or else they'll find a more pliable competitor. The power dynamics are different in more horizontal markets.

[aprdm]

Every quarter ? Sometimes I would settle for every week.

[rubicon33]

Oh my god you just perfectly described the frustration of working in enterprise SaaS. It’s been fun in some ways but the constant churn of almost-but-not-entirely-production-grade software is soul crushing. We celebrate and reward speed to market and lack of process in a way that feels unhealthy and unrewarding.

I’ve worked at consumer facing companies but also other enterprise SaaS and have to say I’ve never seen it done like this before. Just ruthless pursuit of features over polish, craft, etc.

[pixl97]

Customers buy features, customers rarely buy polish.

[snarf21]

This is what I've come to refer to as a Spice Girls sales team.

The solution is for the cost of these new additions to come off the top of the deal (pre-commission) they are signing to re-align the incentives.