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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted and, if they signed, would come back to the team and say “we’ve got to build this before they launch!” No harm, no foul, I thought, so long as we knew we were able to build the feature before they started using the product. This is a tactic commonly suggested by lean practitioners. My co-founders, though, would often frown on this behavior, worrying it was unethical, causing a huge amount of tension to grow beneath the surface.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is the same kind of fraud that Holmes got nailed to the wall for committing.

It's entirely possible to close deals without lying, if you can still deliver the needed functionality in time. Why would anyone do this?

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If you are competing against folks who always tell the truth, a willingness to lie will get you some short-term wins. He said it is “commonly suggested by lean practitioners” whatever that means.

Personally it makes me want to figure out what a “lean practitioner” is so I can avoid them like the plague.

From experience, this is quite common in enterprise sales. Having been on both sides of such transactions, I’m now quite sceptical of features/functionalities unless I can test drive myself. Some stuff I’ve seen:

- chatbot sales: “see how it recovers here because I misunderstood the question and gave a different answer than expected?”. (Demo was a linear path with this ‘recovery’ hard coded) - Buy side: “yes absolutely we already integrate with X”. Queue 12 months of delays because they had never integrated with that platform before.

But, I think I get it. The deals are huge and you only sell a few a year. Once an enterprise commits, it is unlikely to switch vendors unless it goes really really bad. So, the salesperson that convincingly lies gets the deal, and surprisingly the downside is relatively limited.

OTOH, not massaging the truth might mean losing that deal. Huge downside, very limited upside. (Yes the buyer might be a bit more happy, but that likely doesn’t outweigh sometimes missing a multi million deal, unless buyer talk a lot with each other).

Guess it all depends on how you value your company's reputation versus short-term profits. I've personally worked on an API integration with such a company who delivered less than they'd promised. We certainly won't be building anything new in the future with their platform. And even this existing project will probably migrate away when feasible (though that, admittedly, will be quite a while from now, given how busy we are).

"lean practitioner" probably means the lean startup types. A set of ideas ostensibly based on Lean Manufacturing (aka, Toyota Production System) that, like Lean Manufacturing, are often implemented by imitation rather than by comprehension and serious consideration.

There's a massive difference from saying "yeah, this thing has keyword search already, we just didn't turn it on yet" during a software from giving a diabetic saline while claiming it's insulin. Holmes did the latter. People actually expended additional bloodwork and treatment due to the false testing.

> I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure this is the same kind of fraud that Holmes got nailed to the wall for committing.

Interestingly, she was found guilty of defrauding investors, but acquitted with regard to defrauding patients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

There is a saying:

”The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

- Anatole France

It's not the same as what Holmes did, but it is dishonest.

All good relationships, including business ones, are built on a foundation of trust. If you don't have that, it will fall.

Because even customers don’t always know what they want. A lot of customers want peace of mind when they’re buying a product, and you can’t always build up that trust in a single call, so a white lie that gets them as a customers as long as you can fully deliver on that promise seems optimal for both parties.

Telling a customer “we don’t have that yet” knowing full well they just care if you have it, and knowing full well you can deliver it as promised, just creates unnecessary doubt that could lead to a worse situation for everyone. One where a customer passes on you because they don’t know you well enough to trust you can deliver, and you don’t get the sale because you didn’t happen to create some very simple feature before a customer demanded it. That’s a lose-lose.

This complaint just reeks of “I’ve never worked in a company or role that didn’t already have all the uncertainty figured out”. Building features nobody wants as insurance in case somebody finally asks for it is a waste of human talent.

>I'm pretty sure this is the same kind of fraud that Holmes got nailed to the wall for

Yes but she got nailed for violating FDA laws. Saying your software can do something before it's even on the roadmap is what I've experienced in every org I've worked in... overpromise and if the oompa-loompas can't deliver it's their fault not mine

Lying to customers isn't good, but lying to investors is a crime against rich people & will certainly cause trouble for you.

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