> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted
What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've worked for have, too – sales people are very happy to overstate the available features and capabilities of any product. From their perspective, a shoddy, rushed implementation to an unhappy client is still better than having them walk away from the purchase entirely.
This cannot be overstated. If you give the sales team any room or freedom, they will make your life hell trying to keep up with "features" that outdo everyone else just so they can get their commission check. They don't have to deal with anything beyond signing of the purchase, so they don't care that it sinks everyone else to get that purchase.
That would result in mass unemployment in some sectors of industry.
The problem is that as long as your competitor says 'yes' and you say 'no' the competitor will get the customer.
Customers should be firing companies that provide false information during the lead-up to a sale. Then the sales people can stay employed and everybody comes out ahead.
This is just how things work in a lot of industries.
You promise the world to make a sale, then once you've signed, work frantically to make the vision you sold a reality. If you were open and honest, you wouldn't sell a thing.
The only people who lose out are those who take salespeople on their word and don't get everything agreed in writing. Never take a salesperson on their word.
Companies who did this would be systemically outcompeted by companies who choose to look the other way when their salespeople overpromise. And you will find that in general, they are not saying "we have feature X as an available feature as of today" -- they say things like "feature X is under development" and work to upsell it/et cetera. It can be an extremely effective tactic for a lean company to explore the market without overinvesting in development, and it can be destructive behavior by salespeople to advance themselves at the cost of the company.
Like so many things, it's a balance, not an opposition.
I agree. But just because something should happen, doesn't mean that it will.
I don't work with a startup, or even in the tech industry, but this is an issue that takes up ~25% of my time. I have to keep pushing back on sales to make sure that they're not selling something that's physically impossible, or just plain stupid (but sounds good).
This is something that cuts across business in America in general, I think.
From my experience, big enterprise product company representatives like to do this:
Question: Does your application has x, y and z feature and can be integrated in our process easily?
Answer: Sure, all there. Just have to tweak a few settings in the GUI.
Truth: We have a bare-bone product and a semi-documented API. Feel free to implement all the features you want and adapt it to your process. We can provide you professional services (for a price, of course).
You (not you the person I'm replying to, 'you' the company/sales person) that are taking money from somebody based on an untruth. It's outrageous, regardless of how often it happens. I have the right to know what I'm getting for my money. Don't lie to me, ever.
Since you are competing against people who will tell you that the feature they want already exists, people who are too honest in this area will quickly get filtered out of the marketplace.
It sucks, but there are lots of markets where the customer says "please lie to me" and gives their business to the person with the most reassuring lie.
This philosophy seems to imply that trust and relationships are worthless in business. If you perpetually promise features that don't exist, you'll eventually promise something that either can't be implemented at all or has to be implemented sloppily to deliver.
How can you possibly sustain a long-term business when you're so willing to damage business relationships?
However, the startup that (wins a big contract with a big promise && delivers on its promise) certainly has a larger chance to become a long-term business than the ones that short circuit themselves out by not winning contracts.
I don't think that's true. In my experience, the very best companies all refuse to do this. If you leak an upcoming Google feature or promise something to a customer that doesn't exist, you get fired. Same at Facebook and Apple, or Blizzard.
I do think it's much more common in highly competitive markets with no barriers to entry. Google/Facebook/Apple have pretty strong moats and large diverse markets, and can afford to release products "when they're done" and not talk about them until then. People in very competitive, low-margin markets often need the sale now. But then, people in the latter type of markets quickly get filtered out of the marketplace regardless of what they do.
Google and Blizzard are selling mass-market products. When selling enterprise software, you can find yourself facing checklists of "product must do X." (Even if the customer will never ever ever use X.)
It also puts employees under constant pressure, since every feature is already "late" as soon as implementation begins, and extraordinary effort is required on an ongoing basis just to keep the company from embarrassing itself.
At the company I work for, executives and sales people frequently make "commitments" to our customers for features that don't yet exist. People who make commitments on my behalf without even mentioning them to me beforehand (let alone asking me if what they're promising is even possible to deliver) don't get my full respect.
I worked for a founder who did this all the time and it's incredibly stressful as an employee. It would be fine in the limited case where the features are fast and easy to implement: say two days' work at most. I enjoy my paychecks clearing every other week, and losing a sale over small amounts of effort is dumb, particularly since sales where relatively large (low hundreds of thousands of dollars). But this founder didn't know and frankly didn't care about that; he talked about features we'd just begun to do basic research on as if they existed.
I'm being intentionally somewhat vague here, so it's hard to really relate the details, but in one case he discussed a feature (having to do with distributed markov chains) that not only didn't exist but, afaik, nobody in the world even understands how to do and is the subject of active research. Needless to say, not something that could be implemented in a couple days. Worse, we where talking to some phds who fucking understood the above, and they immediately started asking me how the fuck we did it!
And yes, it often made us look like complete assholes in front of customers.
I worked for a guy that did this too. Instead of me losing sleep over it, I put my job on the line (because if this was standard operating procedure then I would rather be unemployed...) and told him he needed to come clean with who he sold admitting he was at fault and not the developers/etc. If a sales person has to eat crow they quickly learn to avoid future crow eating. Things were much better after that.
I'm guessing you mean distributed Markov Chain Monte Carlo ?
Sounds like an interesting problem, I'd really like to hear more about that.
I'm really interested in "difficult" problems with significant commercial applications. (My contact info is in my profile if you don't want to post publicly).
This is incredibly common behaviour amongst sales people. Or what is also common is 'oh, funny you should mention that, we have a team working on that feature as we speak'.
90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.
As a developer, I've been on the receiving end of "we promised the client we could do this, and they've already paid us, so get to it" more times than I can count... it's my least favorite salesman trait, by far.
While I'm not defending the practice of vaporware, it's not the root of the problem here. The root of the problem is that if you have a policy of working unpaid overtime, unless you are lucky in finding only wise or scrupulous employers, your life is going to be trashed.
To you, it is completely irrelevant whether the reason your employer ordered you to trash your life was because the salesman sold vaporware, or because of the phase of the moon; the outcome for you is the same regardless of the reason the order was given. You have to change your policy of obeying such orders.
its even worse when you're in the meeting with the client when the sales people say you've already got this feature and you're thinking "no, no we don't dear go this is going to take a massive database change and....."
We do this all the time for features on our roadmap, if a high level client wants to "sign up" and basically pay for the new feature we move it up in the roadmap.
That's not even remotely my least favorite, as at least salespeople who overpromise too much tend to get caught out.
My least favorite is salespeople who give product away for free (including the support thereof), hurting the bottom line, since their commission is on gross.
You are referring to a phenomenon known as vaporware [0]. Microsoft was notorious for using this strategy of pre-announcing features in order to kill smaller competitors from developing them, afraid that they won't be able to compete with the 800-pound gorilla [1]. Lots of other companies starting copying this tactic, so much so that tech industry publications like Wired started bringing out annual lists of vaporware [2]. Eventually the Justice Department filed lawsuit against Microsoft [3]. Amicus is just following a long, time-honored tradition.
It's called vaperware and it's part of a lean strategy (that way you only build what people actually want). It's extremely common, in fact I believe New Relic was founded using this type of strategy. Take this with a grain of salt because this is an old passing memory of mine, but I believe Lew Cirne called up business owners and sold a bunch of them on the original new relic product before even developing it.
I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying), if it is some sort of technology that you aren't sure is possible or not that is certainly different.
"...I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying)"
So the salesperson/founder needs to have a good enough model of how the software works so that they know if a feature is relatively easy to provide, or if as another poster commented, it would require say a major change in a database design.
I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying)
When I was being sold to, I developed a good ear for phrases like 'in development' or 'that is just a custom report'. We used put it all in writing &c.
as someone who headed the dev team in a startup where the ceo did this repeatedly, i have to say it's a huge mistake. it was very demoralising to the entire engineering side of the company; we felt that we were never given a chance to deliver a properly working product because we were always working round the clock and frantically adding half-baked features that had been used to close a sale.
1. In my limited experience with pitching/salesing when you say "Yeah I think we can probably build that" the customer/client will take it as "We already have this". There is no amount of rational talking and explaining you can put in place to prevent this. If they ask for something, and your answer is anything but an unequivocal "No." they will think you already have it.
2. Isn't the whole concept of MVP and lean basically going out to people and saying "We have this" then seeing if somebody pays, and if they do, making it?
1: "Yeah, we can build that. It will cost $TIME and will add an extra $$$ MEGABUCKS to the total cost".
One basic technique is to keep track of the life time cost of sales, development, delivery and support/maintenance for all projects, and then measure the performance of salespeople based on both income and cost (as opposed to just income) makes them a lot more motivated to sell good solutions.
My understanding of MVP is that you essentially sell a lack of features. Make something that does as little as possible that someone will buy, not selling something and then figuring out how to do it.
As somebody who has been on the developer side of that, I'd say that it depends on the feature, and on the available time. If you are sure that it's viable (as I'm assuming the author was), why not?
I'd still prefer to frame it as "that's on our roadmap, and will be done by the time we close the contract", but then, there's little practical difference.
What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.