When sales keeps asking about a feature, it's either a real customer deal on the line or general anxiety about looking innovative. Use product management to figure out which, then decide if it's worth building.
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Why isn't that feature done yet? We just added 25 people, right? Why can't we ship this? Why aren't we going faster? What are people doing over there? What do sales actually mean when they're asking that? What we're gonna do today is actually we're gonna walk through like what they really mean when they're asking you those things. And once you know what they actually mean, like, what are we going to do about it? How are we actually going to get ahead of it and how do we actually address it? I think when they're asking for feature X and Y, it could be a couple of things going on. And part of this is unpacking this or figuring that out. Sometimes it's like actually there's some specific market or some specific customer that they really want to actually sell and they can't, right? And so they're really looking for that unlock here to actually understand when can I actually sell that customer, especially in environments where it's, you know, that customer is very hard to reach and super scarce and they get there and then like they really wanna buy this thing but you don't actually support their thing. And so there's a lot of frustration built into that being like, ugh, I worked so hard to bring that customer to the table and we can't sell it, like, Why can't we do that? You know, why can't we do that? When can we do that? Right? So that's one theme that actually could be happening there. The other possibility could be just like general paranoia, which is they're worried about next year, or they're losing general deals, and they just want more stuff to talk about, just more stuff. Right? They want more stuff to actually see coming down the way. They want to feel confident as a sales team that they're, they're piggybacked with a engineering team that's going to get them stuff right there and get them that's innovative. That's the right stuff. In a perfect world, sales would love every feature to actually bring in 1,000 more customers and bring in, you know, a bunch more sales. But in lieu of that, sometimes they're just looking for things to show that we're innovative and trying new things out there. And pro tip: use product to help you on this stuff. This is what product's job is, to figure out these things. Sometimes it's about converting existing customers. Sometimes it's actually about just showing the organization, building confidence in your engineering R&D team.
