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Comment by 3maj | Hacker News Reader

>The only financial services companies that are seeing positive uplift from these sorts of initiatives are those with enough resources to try this path, fail at it, and then decide they wanted to build 100% of their own stack in-house anyways.

The issue is a lot of the executives that join the bank's C-suite after 10-15 years of experience usually come from consulting... And as you can imagine they keep hiring and re-hiring their old firms to have 2-3 business graduates come and make a PPT telling a room full of engineers and developers how they should be building complex systems.

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> and make a PPT telling a room full of engineers and developers how they should be building complex systems.

This is unfortunately not an experience I am unfamiliar with. I have to pretend to eat a big plate of humble pie on the first technical call with a lot of our clients.

Once you learn their first reaction is going to be to reject your proposal on arbitrary grounds (i.e. a new security theater show), you start to present simpler proposals purely for the sake of tripping their initial response. Once you get them to fire their objections across the way, it is really easy to review the impact and build the real proposal that meticulously deals with each point that was raised.

I'm having this exact issue now. For me, your timing was perfect, thanks.

Priceless and timeless advice for both internal and external engagements.

Bob nailed it for sure. This approach works.

This is usually good advice for any time you're selling a proposal. Your first attempt is going to be shot down. The more detail it has, the more ammunition there is to shoot it down. So build the minimum viable presentation that's going to trigger an emotional response and tease out the actual issues. Build the real proposal once you've triggered your customer into revealing what's actually on their mind.

People often can't express what they want, until you show them what they don't want.

When building a proposal to C-suite or stakeholders bring it to a level they will understand. Don't focus on technology, stacks, interfaces. Focus on efficiency, improved operations, reduced costs, bigger bottom line. This is the language that is hard to argue.

This is my experience as well. I work for a pretty large consultancy and the majority of my projects, when i look up the primary stake holder on the client side that brought us in, oh would you look at that he used to work at my consultancy 3 years ago.

Most of our biggest clients leadership is filled with ex-employees of my firm.

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