How should product and sales alignment be maintained, and who is accountable when it breaks down?

Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

Responsibility for whether a product sells sits with the product team, and explicitly with the product manager, not with sales

Outcome-based goal setting is designed that way on purpose — if the product isn't selling, the PM must go sit with the sales organisation and diagnose why (visibility, sales understanding, sales tools, reference customers)

46:40 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

When product and sales distrust each other, the fix is CEO leadership forcing collaboration, and product must be made to understand it is accountable for revenue

The sales forecast is built on product delivering committed features, so missed delivery directly causes missed revenue

Scope: product is responsible for revenue indirectly, not as directly as sales

21:03 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

The biggest way companies get the sales org wrong is a CEO who fails to support product–sales collaboration, which produces silos and mutual distrust

Product builds what it wants, sales can't sell it, each blames the other, and the two functions stop trusting each other — an outcome he's seen and that isn't uncommon

20:24 Ceo failure to force collaboration is the root cause

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

You can hold a sales organization together through a bad patch only if the product org acknowledges rep feedback, commits to a plan and timeline, and actually delivers

Reps stay when they believe they're being armed to win; if they feel sent into a gunfight with a switchblade and ignored, they leave

52:18 Product responsiveness to rep feedback retains the team

Chris Degnan · Oct 10, 2025

As sales leader he should have forced the product decision — pushing through the acquisition of a company with a world-class notebook — rather than deferring product calls to others

His habit was to say he doesn't make product decisions and to let the smart people do it; in hindsight he should have been forceful

30:23 Sales leader should forcefully push product decisions rather than defer to product

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023

Product's job in a sales-versus-engineering conflict is to reject both presented options and find a third way, usually by talking to the customer and discovering they don't actually need the feature

People present myopic binary options; teasing out the real need with the customer often shows a different solution eliminates work they had planned anyway, which diffuses the situation and enrolls them

49:21 Product should reject binary sales vs engineering options and find a third way via customer conversation

AJ Tennant · Oct 23, 2024

The most important lesson from Slack is that collaborative tension between R&D and go-to-market is critical, and the way to break product resistance is to put engineers and product leaders directly on customer calls

At Slack parts of engineering resisted supporting customers over 5,000 users; bringing them onto calls to hear the challenges from Comcast and Walmart directly built empathy and pushed the organization through

9:19 Engineers on customer calls builds empathy and breaks product resistance