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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: 0s | 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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VladVladikoff ◴[21 Aug 25 17:35 UTC] No.44975666[source]▶
I run a small tech startup, about 2M ARR. And at times we’ve been short staffed on support and I’ve sat in for support for a day or two. And every time I do this I discover loads of issues customers are complaining about that don’t seem to ever make it back to our engineering team. Perhaps it’s just our support reps, or the nature of support, but they seem to love to “solve” problems themselves rather than reporting it to engineering for a more permanent fix.
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1. ranger_danger ◴[21 Aug 25 18:26 UTC] No.44976296[source]▶
> don’t seem to ever make it back to our engineering team

Does support have a procedure for this or is it ever part of any training or meetings? Otherwise I hesitate not to call it a management issue, no offense.