What is with software engineers anyway? Have they been sent directly to the planet, bypassing the usual stops along the road of life that bring the rest of us humility, compassion, and the ability to take direction? Buckle up, kids! I’m on a rampage.
Say you’re the marketing executive whose JOB it is to come up with a product strategy. Imagine that you spend weeks creating a killer product requirements document after doing things like meeting with customers, talking to analysts, analyzing research data, only to have that document CAST ASIDE by an engineer who FELT LIKE doing something else. Can you stand it?
If you’re in the tech world, you know this happens all the time. You know that when the rest of us are meeting to plot product execution and develop roadmaps, those stinking engineers are in the BREAK ROOM playing PING PONG. And you know that some months later, when a product is released that has NOTHING TO DO with the product strategy you recommended, a product who’s functionality that the doc people can only guess at, a product that the QA people can’t imagine how to test, you KNOW that if you call a meeting with the engineers responsible, you KNOW they won’t show. Hell no! Especially not if it’s before 11am because they won’t be in yet—having stayed up till 4am playing online Dungeons and Dragons with their virtual friends in China.
You also know that when customers receive this piece of crap they’ll never disrupt their data centers to install it. Analysts and press will be stumped. Product revenue will go down, which in turn will make the stock tank and piss off the shareholders. The CEO will look to her staff saying, “The f*ck?” Her staff will look to their staffs, and so on down the line until the buck stops at your office. After all, it was YOUR JOB to write the product strategy.
I know you engineers out there have loaded your slingshots, but go ahead, I can take it.
What do you think?
i'm sooooo not in the "tech world" but you crack me up anyway - and i can feel your pain.... ;->
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting perspective from marketing... I always thought you guys just sat around thinking up impossible products for us to work on. Oh, and you forgot foosball.
ReplyDeleteBut really, when I worked at Intuit that wasn't my experience at all. Our team worked closely (almost too closely) with product marketing. We read the marketing reqs docs... marketing read our design specs... we had focus groups together... and there was a manager atop all of us to ensure that we were working together. But we were also the most customer-focused product team that I have ever worked on. I loved it.
(Except for the part where marketing screamed in my ear about my first-draft spec and made me mad for so many days that it ruined my backpacking vacation.)
It sounds to me like you're working at a bloated company that doesn't know what to do but play with itself. Your upper levels need the boot.