By no means am I defending it per se, but you’re grossly oversimplifying.
That’d be akin to saying “what is sales other than sending a bunch of emails, sharing benefits pamphlets, and taking commission cuts when necessary?”
That’d be akin to saying “what is sales other than sending a bunch of emails, sharing benefits pamphlets, and taking commission cuts when necessary?”
Like being real estate agent are just like car salesmen that happen to sell house instead of car. They show you the product try to use your emotion to manipulate you into buying it and collect a commission :-)
First - who are you selling to? Does your product fit their needs or are you wasting everyone's time? How do you find who to sell to? Is there a feature that keeps getting requested that you can bubble up to the product team?
How do you close a sale, or even know who the decision maker is? Is the price too high or too low? Is there a way to work around financing or timing issues?
There is a lot that goes into sales that bleeds into product, marketing and user experience. Not every sale needs all this attention but a salesman needs some sense of all these things to make those extra sales and not waste extra time/money on dead ends.
Flip side would be saying making websites is just making product designs clickable and tying all expected functionality together. Technically true, but it ignores scaling, user flow, bugs, logging, robustness, optimization, etc.
When something looks simple you may be looking too narrowly at something that connects to lots of other areas.