Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Can your sales team pass the PM test?

2 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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Speaker (Lenny Rachitsky) presents a "PM test" for account executives: when placed before engineers they should quickly be identifiable as sales (not PM) — a proxy for having deep product knowledge. He argues sales reps must have strong product depth to gain credibility with product and engineering teams, and because top GTM orgs act as both revenue engines and R&D. He emphasizes that sales teams, through extensive customer conversations, can surface high-quality signals and function as an extension of product management by feeding those signals into the product roadmap.

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The litmus test I have always given my sales team is if you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product manager. What I'm trying to get across is you need to have incredible product depth. The reason for that is twofold. One it gives you credibility with the product and engineering org and two the best go to market orgs on the planet are equal parts revenue driving and R and D. The reason I emphasize the latter is if you think about a product management organization, you may have a UXR team out doing research. If I have a 20 person sales team, think of the number of customers that we talk to in a week. If we can do an excellent job of translating all of that feedback into signal and then feeding that into the roadmap, we can be an extension of the product management org.