Delivering on Something That Doesn’t Exist

• Yesterday, in a fit of frustration, I tweeted this:
  • Not once in my 20 year career have I seen a sales person held accountable for selling something that doesn’t exist. And yet I’ve seen countless engineers held accountable for not delivering something that was sold that didn’t exist. My single biggest frustration with our industry

My Employer

Defining “Doesn’t Exist”

• I think the “complete vaporware” case is actually the least common case.
• “overly optimistic hallway conversation”
  • they look at what the client has talked about during the sales cycle, and they look at the capabilities of the product they sell and they start to see similarities
• “didn’t say it couldn’t do it”
  • where the client themselves starts to see functionality that isn’t there, kind of similar to the “overly optimistic hallway conversation” case, but from the client’s point of view.
• “easy, but only if we’re not working on anything else”
  • the product could be modified to do what the client wants without too much difficulty […]
  • But, in reality, getting engineering time is a zero-sum game. So doing even this small modification means bumping off something else
• One can imagine many more incarnations of “doesn’t exist” like “poorly trained sales force” or “too junior to know better” or “was mislead by product or marketing teams” or “ambitious, detached, and/or optimistic senior engineering manager ok’d it” or “absolute expert in product could configure it, but mere mortals don’t stand a chance to get it right” or even “works fine at a certain scale, but totally falls apart at one order of magnitude larger” or “could be done, but creates an unacceptable ongoing operational cost”.

Sales People

• I’m not knocking sales people, as a class. What I am knocking is two things: 1) the system of incentives that creates the moral hazard that attracts people to sell things that don’t exist, and 2) the handful of individuals (and it really only takes one) who push this system too far. This is what needs to be held accountable. Not just for the sake of engineers, but also for the preponderance of good sales people who suffer because they won’t cheat in this prisoner’s dilemma problem to make their quota. Because sales people really do have to work their ass off to move the company forward, just as much as engineers do.

Making Revenue and the Contribution of the Sales Team

So Why Do We End Up Here?

• sales culture tends to be a set-the-bar-high-and-you’ll-get-results, sports-metaphor-inspired, go-big-or-go-home kind of culture. Good sales people are competitive to their core. They hate losing. And they are doggedly persistent.
• Engineers tend to find this truth mystifying because many of those same qualitites in an engineer are a complete and total disaster.
• mzabaro note: sales is an individual sport, like a sprint or a marathon; engineering is usually a team sport, like football or basketball
• In companies where this is the worst, sales people are compensated based on the contracts they get signed, primarily, and the actual revenue that comes off those contracts over the long term secondarily, if at all. This creates an incentive to get things signed at all costs.
• VPs and Directors of sales teams, however, have a more holistic incentive. Their compensation tends to be tied a bit more to long term company outcomes. […] The problem is, how do they tell the difference between someone selling something that isn’t there and engineering simply screwing up or being slow?

What’s the Cost of Being Here?

• Too often, we focus on the client we’re going to lose if we don’t deliver the “doesn’t exist” feature. But what about the other clients and, it should be called out, the other sales people who the company made commitments to in an orderly fashion and put on a roadmap to deliver features to?
• There’s also a cost to developer attrition. Especially in this tight labor market, why would the most talented developers stick around for this kind of treatment? They wouldn’t, that’s the answer. Pretty soon you have a negative self-reinforcement cycle where bad developers stay and good developers leave
• once you’ve rewarded cheating and all the players in the game see it, then every rational actor in the equation shoudl also start cheating. Or, let’s say “swinging big” instead of “cheating” if that’s easier to digest.

Ok, Tough Guy, How Would You Fix This?

• The first, easily-digestible fix is to simply stop celebrating this behavior. Did fulfilling a sale require midnight heroics and lots of heat and light to pull over the line? Don’t celebrate it as a victory then. Don’t make it part of your company lore. Don’t stand up in company all hands and sing kudos to the sales people who made it happen. Treat it like the narrowly-missed disaster that it was and just say nothing about it. Instead, celebrate the top sales people who actually sold what your company has. Don’t promote the people who engage in this behavior. And then see how much more of the right kinds of sales you get.
• Second, create visibility. This rests squarely in the hands of engineering leadership. We’re not a terribly confrontational bunch. We tend not to like to have uncomfortable conversations. But we’ve got to do it anyway. […] Create relationships with your counterparts in product and sales and make sure that, each time this happens, everyone knows exactly what was traded off in order to make the sale happen. Don’t be a dick about it, just convey facts. […] Articulate the cost in terms that make sense to sales people. Don’t just assume your gripes will be understood in a salad of engineering speak. Don’t just complain once. Complain repeatedly and constructively and to the right people. Say it in words that a team player would say, not a disgruntled do-nothing. But do, in fact, say it. And don’t be afraid to make people uncomfortable, including yourself.
• Last, and here’s the bitter pill, create a financial incentive to discourage this behavior. If completing a sale requires engineering work to get things done, then take 10% of the sales commission and put it in a bonus pool for engineering that gets paid out at the end of the year. Think that’s unfair? Well, would the sale have happened without the engineering work? No? Then engineering should get a cut because they were basically (and involuntarily) part of your sales team. I call that fair. And, besides, if it really was that valuable of a sale compared to sales you could have made with the products you already had, then you’ll come out ahead still, anyway. And if it wasn’t valuable enough to overcome that 10%, then the sale shouldn’t have been made. Because, at the end of the day, it really did cost the company to make that sale. Maybe it didn’t cost you to make that sale, but it did cost the company. So it’s not good for the company as a whole unless it was a really, really good sale. And, anyway, engineers aren’t monks. Just see how much more cooperative and vigorous those engineers are if they’ve got skin in the game, too.