Are your product and sales strategy strangers?

In the software industry, it’s common to align cross-functional teams for development, and it’s the current best practice.

So why is leadership so siloed? 

I hear many founders and product leaders frustrated with common challenges such as…

- “Sales signed a big contract, but we don’t have a bunch of the features. So we now have to drop everything and rush these out.”

- “The sales pipeline is full of leads from different sectors. We never intended the product for these sectors.”

- “My roadmap has high-value strategic initiatives on it, but my teams never get to work on them. They are stuck firefighting or dealing with last-minute requests.”

Too many companies have got stuck in a current that is dragging them down and taking them away from their high growth opportunity. 

A killer problem is the sales strategy and product strategy has never been met. 

The risk of losing immediate revenue influences the sales leader - “we need a feature to get this cash”. CEOs / founders are always under revenue pressure from investors. This common occurrence forces a reactive product investment and, despite the short term win, prevents exponential growth. 

The hard truth is that many don’t want to hear about the CPO needing to level up their leadership. As a result, too many find themselves behaving like program directors. Many know they are stuck. Many know what good looks like. Many are experts.

So why are so many stuck?

In my experience helping CPOs and founders, what’s missing isn't where they want to go but how to get there; change is hard. But, with pragmatic advice and coaching, I see CPOs get unstuck, move forward and rapidly grow.