We Need to Talk About Bruno
The Cop-Out of "Craft"
Welcome to Frank Takeaways. I'm Frank, writing the notes worth keeping from decades at companies like Slack, Etsy, and Google. I run a coaching practice dedicated to guiding leaders through the tricky stuff of building products and high-performing teams.
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Among product circles — especially the self-anointed Twitter/X PM Elites — there's a quiet hierarchy: "pure" PMs, guardians of taste and user empathy, look down on those who get close to Sales, rolling their eyes at "feature factories" and "customer requests." To them, working with Sales means compromising vision — building what sells rather than what's "right."
This isn't just arrogant; it's lazy. Because craft without adoption isn't craft — it's just theory. Ignoring feedback from Sales doesn't protect quality — it avoids the messy reality of shipping products people genuinely want. When I was designer at Google we used to say "real designers ship" — and the same goes for PMs. Your work isn't done until users and buyers embrace what you've built.
Pretending you're above Sales isn't discipline, it's malpractice.
Sales is Bruno from Encanto — the misunderstood uncle hiding in walls whose visions everyone secretly needs but publicly dismisses. With AI democratizing product development, "good enough" products are cheaper and faster to build than ever. When everyone can ship decent products, your distribution becomes your moat.
I've been that PM, nodding politely in sales meetings while dismissing anything flagged as "a customer request." I told myself it was about integrity; it was really about comfort and control.
I was wrong.
When I was at Slack, we overhauled our Developer Platform. It's challenging to launch a complex, technical ecosystem — complete with APIs, infrastructure, and developer tooling — and even harder to clearly communicate the value externally. I underestimated how critical it was to involve GTM teams earlier to help Sales deeply understand and confidently pitch the platform vision. As a result, we launched without strong sales alignment, had to scramble to build internal clarity post-launch, and adoption suffered.
If you aren't actively building deep partnerships with GTM teams, you're limiting your impact. The productive tension partnership creates consistently outperforms avoidance.
Our Trauma Is Showing: "Taste" as an Excuse
We all know the stereotypes:
Sales: Short-term wins, impulsive feature requests.
Product: Ivory-tower visionaries, detached from commercial realities.
We blame misaligned incentives — Sales' quarterly quotas versus Product's long-term vision — but at its core, the divide stems from ego and comfort zones. PMs often use "taste" or visionary purity as shields, avoiding messy real-world trade-offs. That isn't disciplined — it's defensive.
We carry emotional baggage from forced use of clunky, commercially-driven software: punitive expense tools, miserable ticketing systems — products seemingly built by people that hate people. Those experiences leave lasting scars, making us wary of Sales-driven requests.
But casting Sales as adversaries is equally harmful. Product managers who elevate "taste" above business realities aren't defending users — they're protecting their comfort zones.
Mastery emerges from friction. Sales channels market signals no user interview can replicate: the candid realities of operators, frustrated skeptics, and influential advocates. Ignoring these insights isn't principled — it's avoidance.
The Cost of Avoidance
Your beautiful feature competes fiercely for Sales' limited pitch space.
Sales gets maybe ten pitch minutes in a thirty-minute call. The harder it is to explain the ah-ha moments or feel the payoff the more likely it is to be skipped. What do you do? Work with them before the call. Educate, show — don't just tell (or hope they read your one-pagers).
Your feature isn't just competing in the market — it's competing for airtime. Sales will fill their 10 minutes with whatever they can pitch confidently. Technical superiority isn't enough. Distribution clarity wins.
Avoidance breeds also-ran products disguised as principle.
Missed Insights: Unfiltered Market Signals - Sales conversations reveal exactly what excites buyers, kills deals, or shifts budgets. Calling yourself data-driven while ignoring this isn't principled; it's amateurish.
GTM Misfires: Your Ideas Don't Sell Themselves - Sales can't sell what they don't understand. If they skip your feature, it's not because it's weak — it's because they lack a clear story. Roadmaps die in silence, not sabotage.
Confidence Collapse: The Spiral to Irrelevance - When Sales doubts your vision, they undersell as to not ruin their long-term relationship with the customer. When Product ignores Sales insights, they build blindly. Mutual distrust creates products nobody cares about.
Buzzwords Won't Save You: The New Moat
We invoke "craft" and "delight" like scented candles masking indecision. Too often, these buzzwords deflect from lack of validation.
Quality isn't a vibe — it's a commitment to ship things that work, quickly, and make users feel seen.
Delight isn't sparkles and flourishes — it's shipping something useful, usable, and wanted in the market.
Overusing these words becomes product theater and undermines our ability to be seen as leaders. It's how PMs justify ignoring sales feedback — "We're here to delight users, not chase deals." But if you never test whether your "delight" matters in the wild, you're staging a play for an empty audience.
Roadmaps need less vague "vision" and more real market signal — including the uncomfortable insights from Sales.
We romanticize Marketing for polished campaigns and scalable strategy. But Sales is your best high-touch marketing team: real-time, nuanced, revealing true customer desires and objections.
AI-assisted development is shrinking the competitive advantage of product excellence. As product quality democratizes, distribution becomes your primary competitive moat.
Now, customer relationships — not technical superiority — win markets. Who owns those relationships? Sales.
Building Real Partnerships (Without Losing Your Soul)
I learned this lesson deeply leading a technical product. Initially, my team tuned out Sales signals as "not strategic enough." Joining sales calls shifted my perception. Sales' hesitation wasn't strategic — it was confidence. We didn't need another roadmap; we needed better storytelling and collaboration.
Here's your practical checklist for an AI-accelerated world where distribution trumps perfection:
Shadow sales calls — listen first.
Ask Sales what boosts (or stalls) their confidence.
Co-create essential assets reflecting real customer friction.
Regularly debrief Sales leadership on market realities — not aspirational roadmaps.
Engage actively in Sales' spaces (like Slack channels) as a peer.
Test your feature's 90-second pitch — iterate until Sales nails it confidently.
Pro-tip: Have your favorite sales executive elevator-pitch your feature. It'll be humbling and illuminating. If your roadmap can't survive five minutes of sales scrutiny, it's not a strategy — it's a fantasy.
None of this means abdication. Pareto applies: 80% of revenue still comes from 20% of customers. But guess what? That crucial 20% is exactly where Sales spends their time. Ignore them, ignore your best customers.
Invite Bruno to the table — he sees what you don't.
This isn't compromising — it's applying your principles practically, so products get understood, sold, adopted.
Stop hiding behind "vision." Invite Sales out from behind the walls. Excellence isn't proven in your echo chamber — it's validated in practice by those on the front-line.
Not every sales team is a signal goldmine. But your job isn't to blindly follow — it's to synthesize. And Sales offers some of the highest-signal, highest-friction data you'll ever get.
In the AI age, distribution beats perfection. The best product rarely wins — a good product with superior distribution does.
Product mastery isn't avoiding market realities, it's embracing them.
That's how you ship meaningfully, sell impactfully, and build enduringly. Everything else is theater — and you weren't born for bit parts.
Building bridges takes intention, structure, and outside perspective. Ready to transform Product-Sales collaboration? Let's talk. That's exactly the work I help teams navigate.
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"products seemingly built by people that hate people" haha, seen this so much. I have a working hypothesis that it shows in the final product.