source: https://twitter.com/wagslane/status/1637910671781404673
image description:
a girl is smiling in front of the camera, not directly looking at it. in front of her is a big cake. the text on her reads, “PM showing off latest features”
just on the left and a little behind is a guy, out of focus, blankly staring at the cake. the text on him reads, “dev getting 0 credit”
Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.
I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.
Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won’t be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.
Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D
Sounds like you are doing good PO work, keep at it!
Thank you, I’m sure trying. I got a good 30-35 years left in this, I’d rather not be miserable or make people miserable for the duration.
Glad to hear we’re not the only ones with salespeople promising the moon and the stars to clients without asking first lol
I once had a sales-bro tell the client we’d “monitor the internet for X”. That has remained one of the most important hammers for me to wield when discussions even start coming up. How the fuck does one “monitor the internet” to a degree that fits the clients interpretation of this phrase. Sales guy is still with us and a good lad, he owns that mistake. But fuck was it ever crazy.
I have to imagine it’s quite difficult to do that job well without actually knowing how technology works
Yeah my take away there is if that’s the tech level of your sales guys you need to have a tech sales role and a strict ban on the pure sales people even attempting talking tech. Sales should be talking business and business needs that the solution can adress.
In swoops the project team to sign a contract with a software vendor without any architectural or Product input, then expects you to implement changes for whatever the software does and however it works. They do not know.