> Tie their compensation to the product's financial success.
This is an atrocious idea in anything much larger than a start-up. It leaves the engineering team beholden to bad decisions made in other facets of the company (sales, marketing, upper management). It's exceedingly frustrating to write a solid, stable, performant program only to have marketing or sales push it as something that it is not and nosedive the company due to customers calling bullshit.
Start-ups are somewhat immune to this because of the lower barrier of communication between departments, as many people will be wearing multiple hats due to there being more things to do than people to do them.
This is very visible when executives begin choking off benefits across the board. Nothing kills morale quite like losing your bonus because another department isn't doing its job properly. I've seen more than one mass exodus from a company as a result of this.
> It leaves the engineering team beholden to bad decisions made in other facets of the company (sales, marketing, upper management).
I mean, you're screwed anyways if those people can't do their jobs. No sales means no revenue means engineers taking a pay cut or getting laid off.
So the sales and marketing and product management responsible for your project, need to be on the same product team as the engineers, and have their compensation tied to the product's success.
If the engineers see themselves as the natural enemies of sales and marketing, the product is probably already doomed.
This is an atrocious idea in anything much larger than a start-up. It leaves the engineering team beholden to bad decisions made in other facets of the company (sales, marketing, upper management). It's exceedingly frustrating to write a solid, stable, performant program only to have marketing or sales push it as something that it is not and nosedive the company due to customers calling bullshit.
Start-ups are somewhat immune to this because of the lower barrier of communication between departments, as many people will be wearing multiple hats due to there being more things to do than people to do them.
This is very visible when executives begin choking off benefits across the board. Nothing kills morale quite like losing your bonus because another department isn't doing its job properly. I've seen more than one mass exodus from a company as a result of this.