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.
Eh, I don’t want to present features to stakeholders. It’s pretty thankless, in my experience. The real worthwhile merit is in presenting architecture designs and reviews to tech leadership.
I’m not an architect, but I’ve sat in on architecture presentations and the most rewarding feedback I’ve seen is “Any objections? Ok, approved”.
The rewarding feedback is often during your next compensation review, if you razzle dazzle 'em enough.
Good to hear it happens, even if the praise is all behind closed doors.
When they offer you a 3% uplift, rather than 2% with inflation running higher.
In my current project, we hold reviews together with our customer, because supposedly they work together with us on this project (they have done nothing of value since project start).
And it’s so miserable, because among us colleagues, we really don’t know what everyone else actually developed, because you obviously don’t want to go into deep technical discussions, nor be too critical, when the customers all sit there.
In every dev job I’ve ever held it’s been me or one of the other devs doing demos (usually me though). Granted I haven’t worked on anything truly high profile that a demo would be An Event.
In the end, how is that different from not praising all the library coders and open source parts?
Praise goes to the marketing guys. And rightly so. Without them, nobody of consequence would buy or use the code. ;)
Don’t you just present the stuff yourself as dev? Our sprint review demo’s are done by us, not the PO or something. I thought that’d be standard
A product owner is not the same as a project manager.
This. Many devs will never even meet their Product Manager because they are “too high level to be needed in technical calls”.
Translated to “I only want to tell people how much money this is going to make them without even knowing what it does”
The biggest thank you is to give engineering a commission on sales… If not, it doesn’t matter who does the presentation.