How do you prioritize Sales needs vs Engineering needs?

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How do you prioritize Sales needs vs Engineering needs?

Asked at Salesforce over a year ago

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prisingh · Answer 1 · 2023-05-11T22:39:13+0000

Lets say sales team is requesting a feature that will help with a new deal while eng team is requesting to fix critical bugs that can make product more stable and reliable and thereby reducing customer complants

I would first work with each lead to understand the request in detail

Sales Feature:

How many customers would benefit?
Are these big or small customers?
Impact to revenue?
Understand risks of missing this in current release?

Eng Feature

Understand in depth the stability issues. Scenarios in which this can propogate?
Will this be seen by all or specific customer? What is the magnitude of the issue?
Impact of these bugs? Will the product crash? What features cannot be used etc?
I will also like to udnerstand technical complexity of sales request and effort estimates?

I would then like to tie both the requests back to busienss goals and see how this would align. I would score these two against revenue impact, customer impact, business goal and effort and understand the cost of delaying the feature. Based on this I will priortize one over other.While the new feature may help drive short-term sales, if the product is unreliable and customers experience issues, it will ultimately harm the long-term success of the product and the company's reputation.Goal will be to ensure a better overall customer experience and maintain customer satisfaction in the long run. That being said, I would still work with the sales team to understand their needs and explore alternative solutions or compromises that could meet both their and engineering needs to some extent if possible.

SPD_2017 · Answer 2 · 2022-07-12T22:09:09+0000

Clarify: Can you give me an example of the needs that you are referring to? Are we talking about new product features or infrastructure related requirements?

- Yes let's talk about you need to build a new product and each team has set of needs in order to proceed. How do you pick which ones to prioritize?

For Sales, there are metrics such as which market segment we are planning to track, how important the product feature is based on competitive analysis, the revenue, market share, number of customers interested in the feature. Typically, there is prioritization of the tasks at this level before we present it to the Engineering team.

Once we have understood the ask from sales side, it is important to align with the Engineering team for planning the execution path.

For Engineering, there is usually breakdown of the tasks in terms of duration, resources, cost for the resources, infrastructure (cloud, tools etc) necessary in the process.

@Nag · Answer 3 · 2021-09-03T02:35:45+0000

1) Define strategic imperatives

2) Define strategic choices

3) Evaluate strategic choices using a combination of metrics categories

a) Sales related

-Revenue

-Growth

- Competitiveness

- Alignment with company objectives

-Number of customers impacted

b) Engineering related

- Cost of implementation

- Implementation complexity

- Risk to existing code.

The evaluation process can involve assinging weightages to these metrics and the assiging score against each of the strategic choices