What sales taught me about product | Blog

I’ve had the fortunate and rare opportunity to lead a revenue organization after spending most of my career in product management. Jumping to the other side of the business was eye-opening, humbling, and made it clear how many mistakes I made as a product manager over the years. In an effort to help other product people, I want to share some of the lessons and learnings from leading a sales function and being responsible for an ARR number.

1. The product isn’t everything.

To use a restaurant analogy, the product team makes the food while the marketing, sales, and customer success teams are the front of house staff that round out the entire experience. Don’t build a product without understanding the full end-to-end customer experience—from the website, onboarding, demos, help center docs, and early steps of your sales motion. By stayin across these things you’ll be more adept at finding inconsistencies, disjointed experiences, and inefficiencies that you can work with your GTM teammates to solve.

2. Stop starting with “no”.

Over the years, the craft of product management has become almost religious about certain frameworks, principles, and ways of working. One of those is that you need to become good at saying no, particularly to your sales team. While approaching feedback from any channel with curious skepticism is a good practice, don’t make saying no a badge of honor. Don’t default to “no”. Often great sales people are the best sources of ideas, so don’t let them become apathetic because of the constant pushback from product. Always assume they are telling you something new that could impact previous prioritization decisions. Ask deeper questions and use these moments to share the process you use to prioritize rather than weaponizing it.

3. Sales should be your best researchers.

Sales conversations are more “real” than generative research. Convincing to buy is harder than convincing to use. When push comes to shove, a buying decision forces the true customer need and perceived value of your product to the surface. These conversations are a gold mine if you can arm them with questions to ask and have an easy way for them to share the feedback they hear. They can test new product narratives, improve positioning, recruit beta testers, even give feedback designs of features in development. Don’t fall into the trap of dismissing sales as “solution focused, not problem focused”. If that’s happening it’s your fault for not giving them what they need to help you.

4. Don’t hide. Get out and regularly demo your product.

Everyone PM should do this in front of a new lead at least once a month, no excuses. Craft your talk track, know the magic moments, know how to handle the main exceptions, or position against competition. It’s one thing to write the perfect pitch in Notion or deliver that awesome internal presentation—it’s another thing all together to try to sell a real customer who knows nothing about what you’ve built. This will make you a better PM, help you uncover inconsistencies, and build empathy for what your sales team has to deal with every day. Nothing builds more empathy than a real, live sales conversation—especially if it goes poorly.

5. Your frameworks don’t matter. No one cares. Stop it.

Don’t let the the process become the product. Product management is full of endless frameworks, principles, and ideologies, all of which are useful tools to have in your belt. But they are tools that are useful only when applied appropriately, and they are for you not anyone else. Don’t fall in love with frameworks to neatly describe the problem you’re solving. Do the bare minimum to give your team what they need to fall in love with the solution and how it’s presented to customers. This is what matters and is what your sales team actually cares about, because it’s what the customer actually cares about.

6. Knowing the sales pipeline is just as important as knowing the roadmap.

Too often this hides in a CRM that PMs don’t have licenses to. Fix that. My first week in the new role I could finally see all deals in flight, who the customers were, what was being discussed on calls, what the largest blockers were, and why we were winning and losing deals. I started sending out a weekly update of all deals in flight to the whole product team and made call notes accessible to everyone in product. It’s amazing how your decision making can change when you have access to this data and know how you can help ideal customers get over the line with a few tweaks to your roadmap or hopping on calls to help out.

7. Owning a number is harder than you think.

Stop dismissing sales people as pushing their own short-sighted agenda. Their job is hard and what you do impacts how they get paid. While you have to think in longer time horizons with your product investments, this needs to be balanced with growing the business now. Stop complaining about their urgency—rather, build empathy for it and bring the same urgency your days. A sales quota forces you to really understand how to optimize every day, remove distractions, and understand the opportunity cost of wasted time. Most product teams would benefit from this mindset of urgency and match the intensity of their sales teammates.

8. Changing the roadmap is usually a good thing.

If you plan a 12-month roadmap and ship all features exactly on time, it probably means you’ve learned nothing and shipped the wrong things. Change is not a failure, it’s an admission that you’ve learned something new that is pertinent to what the “right” thing to build is. Your sales team is hearing the latest insights from the market and your customer success team are talking to those pushing the boundaries of the product. Changing too much is bad and a sign that you don’t have a strong enough vision and strategy, but no change at all is just as bad. Listen, learn, change when needed, and communicate your reasoning clearly.

These are just a few of many learnings. At the core, assume that 95% of the time your sales counterparts would make the same decision as you if they had the same knowledge and experience. The source of disagreement and frustration is almost always asymmetric understanding of problems, context, and incentives. Seek to understand these asymmetries first and you’ll likely end up in a better place more often than not.