Which functional relationship generates the most organizational friction, and why?

David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023

The most frictional relationship in a company is engineering and sales, because their short-term versus long-term motivations are opposed and each believes the company would be better if the other had less influence

Sales sees a customer offering $5M for a feature; engineering sees a feature nobody else wants that would damage the product — at Databricks it was bimodal, each side thinking the other ran and was destroying the company

48:34 Sales and engineering opposed short vs long term incentives make it the most frictional relationship

Noah Desai Weiss · Jun 16, 2023

At an enterprise software company the CPO's structural tension is always with sales; at a consumer company it's with marketing, while friction with engineering or design is a symptom of a poorly functioning organization

What sales (or marketing) promises customers and what product can deliver are often at odds; engineering and design should be the CPO's best friends when things work well

42:31 Cpo tension with sales in enterprise and marketing in consumer is structural engineering design friction signals dysfunction

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

Marketing and product speak different languages: marketers are solution-oriented while PMs crystallize problems for engineers, and marketers would work far better with growth/product teams if they grounded themselves in the problem instead

Engineering teams want to be given problems they believe in and figure out solutions themselves, whereas marketers arrive with a list of five things they need done, which is not how engineering teams want to work

42:44 Marketers and pms speak different languages solution oriented vs problem oriented so marketers must ground in the problem

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

There is no playbook for getting product, growth and marketing teams aligned — you get there by grinding through friction, falling out and rebuilding trust over time

That is literally how HubSpot got there; they badly underestimated how hard it would be for all these teams to work together in the PLG motion, and it's like becoming a great presenter — you just grind it out

44:21 No playbook exists for marketing product growth alignment it comes from grinding through friction over time