This is a great anecdote. You have got to be able to sell. If you can't–or you can't hire someone who can–you're dead in the water. It doesn't really matter how good your product is.
I once developed a tool that saved literal days of time every month by automating some very rote workflows. It was appreciated by everyone who had to do the work by hand.
When I tried to sell it to my bosses boss, I realized he literally didn't know a lick about our workflows, where the inefficiencies are, and how they could be remedied.
We could've been making toothbrushes for all he cared.
After a while, I pulled out the super fake looking 'bad bar goes down, good bar goes up' slide and his eyes lit up.
This, right here, might be the most important lesson. Figure out the 1 or 2 things your boss's boss cares about. Show a single slide where the bad things go down and the good things go up. Have a couple of technical nerds that are trusted and agree with you. Bam. 10 minute promotion right there.
Oh. I'll add something. I'm the boss right now. I spend a lot of time trying to make it clear to my team what I care about so they can give me that 1 slide presentation.
I also spend plenty of time learning from my team why they care about stuff that I don't because they often care about important stuff (and I should, too)
I actually envy their ability to sell, even when I know their product is crap and I resent being made to use it by executives who bought a slick sales pitch.
I'd like to believe that there are some products that are good enough and solve pressing enough issues so as to sell themselves. It's probably a naive hope, but I like to cling to it.
I wish there were enough honesty in sales as to not leave such a sour taste.
There's probably some flip side of the coin where sales is being honest about what they were _told_ was delivered, but the product doesn't in actuality live up to what was committed to. In which case the development team should either up their QA standard or adjust what they've committed to developing.
I'm sure there's some possible healthy relationship where there's some sales hype that's used to motivate product improvement, but I haven't personally experienced it.
It worked so well (where are Sybase and the other RDBMS makers?) that everyone else copied the playbook.
For intangible products with high switching costs it’s just more profitable for vendors to lie.
This low integrity process has taken me a long time to come to grips with, and makes me especially prudent as a buyer.
The possible silver lining is that there still exist millions of good problems to solve. But never ever expect solutions to be self-evident.
> But never ever expect solutions to be self-evident.
I certainly don't _expect_ anything. I just hope that there are products out there that don't need sleazy sales tactics, and let the product show it's worth
hope != expectation. i expect to live a life with no shortage of disappointment ;)
In my opinion, right now in IT, "laypeople" don't have a good understanding of how bad things are in many respects, and how much better they could be in others. Moreover, there are a lot of effective "salespeople" in this space, and all this adds up to what I believe is a huge gap in perception and reality here. So the last thing I want is more belief that great IT comes along and saves us?
Over 90% of people who did a demo/trial run bought the product.
Sadly, technology progressed, and the entire market went away. The same "Magic Quadrant"/Market space that Gartner made explicitly because of that product was retired some time back due to not being relevant.
These kinds of projects usually withstand the test of time where flashier projects often burn out because they aren’t good in practice.
Good engineers are always wary of flashy things and keep an eye on substance