Sales-centric VS Product-centric

In my experience, the battle between revenue generating teams and product teams is as old as time within software companies.

Sales teams often don’t appreciate the technical complexities of adding what may seem like a simple feature, field, or button. They want to change the product roadmap to benefit their own individual pipeline as opposed to doing what makes sense for the entire org. Lastly, they’re often more concerned about what the product doesn’t do than anything else and view product teams as lazy for being resistant to change.

Product teams, on the other hand, often don’t appreciate the challenges of generating revenue and can be resistent to feedback from sales and their customers. They want extensive data proving that X feature is worth developing all while the competition is eating our lunch by including it in their solution. Lastly, they believe that every department should serve to make their lives easier and have a tendency to view their contributions as more meaningful compared to other departments.

Obviously, I’m making big generalizations here at both extremes and I expect that most of us will be biased towards preferring sales-centric organizations.

Would love to hear from savages who prefer to work in product-centric orgs and why?