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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: 0.206s | source
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dcastonguay ◴[21 Aug 25 16:17 UTC] No.44974574[source]▶
> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”

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perrygeo ◴[21 Aug 25 17:06 UTC] No.44975269[source]▶
Yep, notice there was no mention at all about why the original software was so ill-designed in the first place. Not even a curiosity as to why. Your conclusion is more valid, though I wouldn't necessarily place the blame on the PM. Agile/Scrum rituals, where blame is diffused and developers are forced to sprint quickly through poorly-designed tickets, yields poorly-designed software. Who could have guessed? Feels like a systematic problem with the "modern" bloated software organization.
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1. deepsun ◴[21 Aug 25 17:29 UTC] No.44975585[source]▶
Part of the task is to push engineers to understand the customer problems and work that way. Sometimes it's hard, when engineers are stubborn (I'm guilty of that too).

This PM eventually found the way to push their engs, as described in the article. So I think PM achieved the goal pretty good.