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

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324 points bilsbie | 4 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.934s | 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. trevor-e ◴[21 Aug 25 19:20 UTC] No.44976911[source]▶
You can never rely on support reps to escalate UX issues to product teams for a couple reasons.

First, from their perspective if they are able to solve an issue by following their script, even if it took 20 convoluted steps, everything is working normally. People are used to occasionally dealing with workarounds so it's not a big deal in their mind.

Second, it's not in their interest to report UX issues. They are measured by the number of tickets they close, so the issue that gets a lot of inbound support and they know an easy workaround for is nicely boosting their numbers. Eventually these things get fixed by product and they move on to doing the same thing with other tickets.

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2. hinkley ◴[21 Aug 25 19:45 UTC] No.44977167[source]▶
Perverse incentives. They are judged by how long the call takes, and every time they escalate a common problem that the devs could fix, now their numbers will go down and they'll get punished for their good work.

Dell at one point pulled the plug on outsourcing their tech support. They spotted this moral hazard partway through the process and decided it was better to keep it in house.

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3. lavelganzu ◴[21 Aug 25 21:35 UTC] No.44978374[source]▶
On the opposite side of moral hazard, early in my career I worked for a large web security company in tech support. We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. Often this meant the only solution was to apply our own, unofficial code changes!
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4. ericbarrett ◴[22 Aug 25 02:58 UTC] No.44980605{3}[source]▶
> We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all.

I have no words! Except that I really want to know the organizational dysfunction that ended up creating that policy.