Agree or disagree? https://thenewstack.io/why-your-platform-engineering-career-is-really-a-sales-job/

true for any career?

@Jordan Chernev i mean you may need to learn to sell yourself, but not necessarily a product. I do believe in the age of AI it’s more important to have more salesy, better comms skills

A hard agree. From what im seeing/reading/observing - that part about being able to describe the reason of your existence as value add and more outcome based is even more crucial as that will allow you to reorientate from being the team that makes things possible after someone describes what the thing is, to, well - being able to understand the opportunity space and also sell the outcome to the stakeholders, users. Because you are also asking for sometimes not helping out, or pushing work to other areas, you are also competing against commercial timelines and priorities. So without that in your toolbox, the fight is over before it starts. And also, not sure if only me, theres a tendency or a pull, in that area to choose the "safer" options - this is an internal technical team, what do you mean they want to switch things up? Lets get someone technical in there to understand the technical needs and push for the technical outputs and so on. One interesting thing i saw the other day was a decent sized company went from wanting to have a platform product manager and to replacing that position with a director of engineering whose one point out of many was to have a roadmap for the platform teams. The company has smart people and there are reasons but from my point of view, that describes the fallacy in thinking that this area just needs to make things happen and the best way to do that is going purely for technical competence. And you better have some sales chops to counter that desire.

Agree as well. You need to build platforms and products that solve your users issues and relentlessly promote it. And then if you’re not getting traction, figure out what’s wrong with what you built and iterate further but even if you’re building the perfect solution out the gate, you need to sell the benefits repeatedly in my experience