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Comment by mehrdada | Hacker News Reader

> sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does

(I cannot distinguish product development from engineering as cleanly as you do, but on sales and marketing...)

Can't disagree more. At least with the definitions I have in my head, this sentence is logically inconsistent with such definitions. Engineering is the way you get non-linear leverages. Sales and marketing, almost always give linear multiples at best.

I feel once you have the "golden goose" leverage delivered by engineering in hand, you start calling it sales because that's the final step in conversion to $$$. Also, that's when the linear multiple provided by sales and marketing is the biggest in absolute numbers.

[But yes, if you call everything you see as "marginal contribution" engineering, and everything valuable "product development", then you tautologically "prove" your conclusion.]

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interestingly, a lot of enterprise Saas software is "sold before its built", by which i dont mean its complete vaporware, but its a very common practice to build a shitty first product, sell sell sell, and only after the first 10-20 customers are on board, do these companies start to spend more on engineering etc. Even after that, in order to sustain the machinery of building product, you need to keep selling. I think both are important, but in the technical world we tend to seriously underestimate how important sales it. At the end of the day, you can have the best alogrithms, the most elegant code and the sexiest UI, but if you dont have someone taking it to customers, and bringing their feedback back, all you have is a beautiful product without a business.

This is exceedingly common. It also makes a helluva lot of people miserable.

This is why for most software (think about anything you run in your browser/phone/desktop pretty much that isn't mission or life critical) software quality, architecture and design ZERO VALUE. In fact that value it delivers is negative since it takes time and human effort to do it which costs money and there's no money to be made from say, correctness.

I agree it is hard to draw a line between the two, but there are some decisions that occur outside of the technology inolved that I would consider product development. Twitter increasing the character limit to 280 is a prime example. There is no technological reason why that should or needed to happen. It was motivated purely by the product. Although you could argue the initial 140 limit is closer to the tech side.

I also think that many people, especially in the tech industry, don't understand the scope of functions included in "sales and marketing". It isn't just sales people calling up customers trying to sell enough to reach their quota. It is nearly everything involved in revenue generation of a company.

One of the most common fallacies you hear voiced by software people is that polynomial/exponential is bigger than linear, because they ignore the constant factors that matter in the concrete cases in the real world. The same fallacy leads to bad engineering choices and bad business choices.

There is definitely a lot of truth to this, but when talking about exponential growth in particular, the growth is often so huge that it eclipses any conceivable linear function in practice pretty quickly.

Also, given sufficiently large numbers, better asymptotic growth always beats. So this is less wrong when talking about huge businesses.

I agree with you about the value of good engineering, but I think you underestimate the value of good marketing.

> Sales and marketing, almost always give linear multiples at best.

Counterexample: Apple's famous 1984 ad.

I knew something like that would come up, hence my use of "almost".

But I actually disagree with your example. I was expecting something like Dollar Shave Club to be used as a counterexample, where the entire value is arguably produced by marketing.

While I don't have metrics (and it is hard to even define a good metric to distinguish the leverage produced by marketing vs. excellent product development when they exist since day 1), I seriously doubt even Apple's 1984 ad had superlinear boost relative to the $ invested on it the ad had the product engineering was not good enough to sell itself.

In fact, I am not sure if it is fair to say the original Mac is an astounding commercial success relative to other computers at its time, unlike Apple II. I feel the ad was famous for its artistic value and post-hoc success of Apple, not much because it actually sold the product.

But back to the primary discussion, think about it this way: had Mac not been a revolutionary product that carried its weight, would that ad even meant anything? As in could you even sensibly run that ad for any product and expect good performance? (This is especially relevant since the ad is pretty abstract and non-product specific, so it is not crazy to imagine this hypothetical scenario.)

Good grief. The entire premise was that owning a Mac made you different, unique. People bought the thing because they identified with THAT not because of specs. How do I know this? Because everyone remembers the commercial and how it made them feel and almost no one remembers the machine and what it did comparative to other options at the time.

You have conflated cause and effect here so much it is hard to untangle just where you diverged from reality, but the 1984 ad was not as important as you think. It ran once. Once. It became important as an icon later, but "everyone" doesn't remember how the commercial made them feel because most of them didn't see it. The Mac was, at the time, such a marvel of hardware and software engineering and so radically different than what was available at the time that it almost sold itself. You probably could not have picked a worse example to try to make the sales vs engineering case.

The original Mac was actually not a very useful product; 128K of memory was enough to get a taste of the graphic user interface, but not enough to do much in the way of useful work. There was a flurry of initial sales to early adopters on the basis of the marketing, the potential, then it fell off. Sales only picked up again when the memory was increased to 512K. That tends to get forgotten nowadays because of what happened afterwards, but it's not at all the case that the original Mac sold itself based on its capabilities as a product.

Well, sure, if you define "value of engineering" to be more than "value of X" you can say engineering is more valuable. That would be a contentious definition, though.

Note that I am not focusing on "value" per se. I was focusing on leverage, i.e. where you can find a "multiplier", and arguing engineering is where you can find superlinear amplications of value.

It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier. It could be 10x, but even that is usually very big. Never exponential, or even quadratic (though in network effect businesses the quadratic amplification via marketing sometimes exists.)

> It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier

Have you ever started a company that successfully exited? Or managed a product from cradle to grave?

There is another comment in here about perspectives gained from taking on multiple roles. If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance, I gently suggest broadening your scope.

> If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance

more than a linear multiplier