for those doing enterprise sales, what is your wish list that your engineering team should do and should operate with you? 🙂

I'm a lowly SE....CLEAR rough edges to avoid. and tell the AEs "NO" (not maybe, not well maybe later depending on priorites)...just say NO

@Mitch as a lowly SE, do you prefer to build your own demos and discuss with eng if they don't work? or would you prefer that engineers build demos that work and give them to you?

I prefer to to extend or modify things. I really believe eng should be building and sharing simply demos, mainly because they need to feel the UX or a thing they built

And... can I give the feedback that it isn't engineering job to say no? This is very much what product exist for.

I'm a startup person....it's everyone's job

Engineers can tell you "It doesn't work now", for sure. They can tell you how to hack it, and the effort to building it with various tradeoffs. But how can they say NO? What if next week the PM talked to 10 more customers, they all have the same issue, and the engineering time is now working on it as top priority? Especially at startups where stuff changes so fast based on field feedback...

ooo sorry I missed where that "no" is coming from

yeah, agree. "Right now we are prioritizing X. We can't promise anything about Y, but please share your feedback so we can make the right call on what to build next"

agreed

At the end of the day, we all want the people we work with to be trustworthy and not give their word lightly.

I think a No is under rated too. If the feature doesn't fit the vision for the product, just say no

Yes, agree. But I am not sure it is right to expect this from engineers.

I'm lumping Product and eng together

Ah, ok 🙂

Funny, engineering want sales to never promise to customers something that they can’t really promise.

And sales want exactly the same thing from engineers “don’t promise me something you actually cannot promise”.

@Gwen Shapira From my experience, that’s because sales are naturally good at negotiations while engineers are naturally bad at it 😄 we are very uncomfortable with silence so we need to fill it up with solutions. unfortunately, those “solutions” are sometimes bad or unrealistic (since us engineers are also notoriously bad at estimates 😅 )

sorry just getting back to this. I find that pure sales folks meeting with engineering with each release tends to be enough. Field technical(SE/SA types) should be VERY tight.