It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter.
You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise your time was given away free to land a deal. Sometimes a deal that fell through anyway.
I've worked in both types of companies, and the ones where sales dictated what we worked on this week were universally awful.
They will mention something you know you should have added but always wrote off as "bloat" or "not really really really needed". Those things start happening more and more the moment you are doing $100K plus deals.
Because I agree about the fundamentals, the things enterprises tend to care about:
- SSO / SAML / auth integrations
- ISO Certifications
- Regular Pen tests
- Localisation support
- APIs ( that they'll never use )
- Bulk operations
- Self-hosting ( or at least isolated / non-shared application cloud hosting )
Get these and similar right and it's the difference between landing enterprise or not.
But if you're talking about features specific to a product, or custom products for a platform, that's a very different thing, and that's where the great distraction can come in. That's where you'll end up developing features that go unused, and it's these which aren't so consistent across customers.
Imagine you make washing machines and get a request for:
" This Washing machine must have a pre-set button for a 57deg 38.5 minute wash. Without that, I couldn't consider this machine ".
You try to argue that you let users define their own pre-sets, and that they can set up their own pre-set for that cycle. But you're denied by the person in sales who insists that they need exactly that as a first-class button on the front of the machine.
That's the level of petty that some large customers will try. In some way, it can be seen as a good sign that they've engaged with your product, but sometimes you wonder if it's just a trial balloon for seeing if you'll put up with the unreasonable.
- Teams & Fine-grained Permissions
- Audit logging
- SOC 2/3 compliance
- Data wiping / retention / data policy management
- Reporting
- Cookie law crap (GDPR & CCPA)
- Myriad forms of custom product tiers & billing arrangements
I'd put these above several of the items on your list, and in my mind, they fit into the category of "things a developer calls 'bloat', that are actually necessary for enterprise sales".
What a lot of these HN programmers seem to miss, is it's not about what you or your application provides. It's about what your competition is willing to provide. If you don't have much competition then that's great, but the moment your 100k-10m paying user starts testing the other software your C-levels and sales people are going to have the programmers locked out of the building the moment they say they won't write a feature.
Small companies often have the CEO in a product position in my experience.
Still isn’t ideal though and more to your point, how they actually do the product role is really what matters. I.e. chasing shiny objects.
The reality is I only get paid because of those deals, and the post deal tech-debt sprint never happens.
So the work has to get done and if sales doesn’t give time for it to be done properly then in 3-6 months velocity will drop and the sales pipeline will dry up.
Any company that can’t understand that is not a long term company I want to work at.
We landed our largest customer by gar a few years back, and we pushed back hard. However we had good arguments why, and explained why changing their workflow would be much better or offered some other approach to solve the problem that didn't involve a new bespoke and brittle feature.
On the other side were a team that knew the processes well and understood our arguments.
After they went live, the management thanked us for helping them improve their organization.
On the other hand there have been cases where decisions is made by leaders so high up they have no idea what's going on by those that need the tool, and aren't interested in spending time or effort on it. Not much you can do then.
edit: Though sometimes they learn. We've had a few customers who we said no to since their wishes were not really feasible, and who selected others and failed, and failed again, before finally ending up with us, on our terms.
I’ve worked at consumer facing companies but also other enterprise SaaS and have to say I’ve never seen it done like this before. Just ruthless pursuit of features over polish, craft, etc.
Can your customer switch to another product, yes or no. If no, then polish won't happen.
Do customers actually value 'real' polish and not just a slick looking UI? If no, then real polish doesn't matter.
As a software writer you'll get your ass kicked into the ground by another company that writes catchy features and nice looking interfaces 9 times out of 10. So few actual customers know out to measure 'polish' that it's almost a non consideration.
The solution is for the cost of these new additions to come off the top of the deal (pre-commission) they are signing to re-align the incentives.