My partner over at The CIO Weblog, Prashanth Rai is addressing an interesting topic over at his personal blog on non-technical managers managing technical people.
As a person that has two engineering degrees but has been involved in management and business development for awhile, another interesting flavor is getting salespeople and engineers/programmers to work together. It is something that I face very frequently in my role at 21Publish.
Some things I would say about the sales & engineering linkage topic (some of which is generally relevant to Prashanth’s topic, even though what I describe is a peer-to-peer relationship versus a strict manager-subordinate role):
- have respect for the strengths of the different parties in the different functional roles
- know one’s own limits
- expand one’s knowledge about what the other party needs to do on a day-to-day basis to win and try to help where you can (or at least be supportive)
- remember that salespeople and business development folks are looking for opportunities to win customers and grow the business on a day-to-day basis (but they need to be careful of overselling)
- recognize that engineers like to build quality/foolproof stuff … salespeople people need to listen carefully to what engineers are saying on issues, etc. because what they are saying is often rigorous and precise
- at the same time, engineers need to recognize that salespeople need to boil things up, if only to be able to communicate with management associated with the sales prospect.
Update (8/4/05): A follow-on thought: salespeople should also try to tap into engineers and programmers for creativity. Getting sales, business development, and R&D to work together can spark innovation (or at least it can make for a fun environment).