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I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

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324 points bilsbie | 1 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | source
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m463 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:41 UTC] No.44974861[source]▶
All the negative responses.

I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product.

And it might be something silly like their coworker added something they didn't know about and the UI is now confusing. Could even be the website started proclaiming something that didn't align well with the product.

Another factor is that the [product -> PM -> bug system -> engineer -> fix -> QA -> product] loop is heavy. It takes a long time and major things get fixed but minor friction doesn't.

having [product <-> engineer] can be amazing.

Engineers might have never encountered the full experience, or may merely be out of sync with how it works today vs last year.

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1. PaulKeeble ◴[21 Aug 25 17:10 UTC] No.44975324[source]▶
There are myriad of ways to get this wrong and I have seen them all happen:

- force all the communications with the users through Project Managers or Product Owners. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they are terrible.

- The customers refuse to talk to the developers and so they are forced to interpret the users managers requirements without any further input.

- The developers just want to write code and refuse to meet the customer forcing all communication through their product manager or bug tracker.

- I have seen a couple of times where commercial software platforms were used the technology can get in the way, they are limited in the types of modifications and customisations that can be applied and this can make some workflows really awful.

There is always a disconnect somewhere, someone blocking a conversation happening and it can be the customer, a middle man or the developers causing it, often its all three to get a really dysfunctional system or the solution has been chosen before any developers or users really got into the details and its the wrong choice.

There are a lot of ways to make systems that aren't very good for the users.