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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem with Agile as implemented by larger corporations is not anything described in the article, but that it’s just fundamentally antithetical for corporations to work agile.

There is just no way that some salesperson is going to be able to sell a product that’s going to be developed in collaboration with a customer in 2 week increments (unless the customer is already specifically dealing with a software consultancy).

They sell a package of ‘this is everything the product is going to do’ and then somehow try to squash that waterfall list of features into ‘stories’, and call it agile.

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In agile, it’s the salesperson that’s the customer, not the actual “customer”. Unless you’re doing professional services or something agile is an internal matter. As with many things the less your customer knows about your inner machinations the better!

That's just factually false: to give a counter-example my company (~200 people) does exactly that (1 week sprints, though).

Except that we don't sell "a product", we sell time. We'll do everything we can to help you getting a product out of this time, but if you can't, you were doomed from the beginning.

It's just a different thing to sell for a salesperson, they have to adapt. But it works.

E.g. the one exception I made in my message, a software consultancy.

It's also the problem that software is not strictly a product, but a mix of service and product. There's the core product that you are selling (say e-commerce) and there's the customization service that's been sold to increment the product per-customer basis.

Traditional sales knows how to sell either a product or a service, hardly the mix of them, which makes software special (but not unique).

Isn't this a problem with the sales team not being able to sale the current product?

If there is a current product. I think they’re generally trying to sell a future ‘better’ product.

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