Cooperation between engineers and business persons was, is and will be hard. It’s as clear as a day. They just have mutually exclusive goals. An average developer wants to make as little features as possible, yet he wants his code to be a masterpiece when talking about architectural design and technologies used (not exactly when talking about quality). An average salesperson wants as many features as possible and good quality, because then a customer will be happy and won’t call her with any quality issues. The salesperson doesn’t give a damn about technology, architectural details etc. Ruby on Rails? So what?
There will be always a conflict here unless you can isolate those groups with several persons who feel both sides. Yes I know, this kind of people are quite rare, they don’t grow on trees or something. Nevertheless, if you happen to have some, use them to build a kind of shield for the rest of the team.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t say to isolate engineers from business background of their work. What more, I’m convinced that the average developer has to hear often how his actions leverages sales, marketing etc. However, the average salesperson isn’t the best choice for a messenger.
Why should you separate those groups of people then? They generally don’t understand each others so they work ineffectively in a group, where you don’t have a mediator being able to lead to the reasonable consensus. Let the engineers work with engineers – it will make them happy, effective and cooperative. Every time I have an occasion to see a small group of engineers working on clearly defined problem, it’s cheering up to me.
They can be our R&D boss working with a lead developer from our subcontractor on resolving project issues. They can be me as lead tester working with a senior developer on eliminating deadlocks-related bugs. They can be our support engineer trying to find a solution to a critical error with maintenance guys on the customer side. I could count examples endlessly. It’s much, much harder to find similar cooperation when the salesperson works directly with the developer.
That’s why I believe that even in small organizations (20-30 persons) you need someone, who brings some isolation between sales force and development force. A project manager or a program manager. Someone who feels business needs yet is an equal partner in discussion with technical staff. Yes, I know, you bring some additional communication effort here, but still it makes organization’s work more effective.
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