I was reminded the other day of the Dilbert cartoon above and it got me to thinking about what other stuff we might not hear around the office at a software company as product managers and product marketing folks.
- I”m pretty sure I lost that deal because I was out sold.
- If you are able to do this demo next week in Des Moines that would be great, since I really need to look busy for my boss and I’m only 30% of quota.
- I’m sorry Mr. CTO, I’m pretty sure we can’t build everything and I hear there are already some good application servers out there anyhow.
- I know it’s been in the backlog for a year, but we are probably never going to change the screens to chartreuse.
- To be honest, I really thought it was a good idea to build the next generation platform, right up and until the migration process.
- No, the client is nowhere near signing and I really have no idea if a discount will help, but you have to take a shot right?
- Just to be clear, I’m pretty sure if I documented what I really thought we could make on this new product you wouldn’t have invested. Am I right?
- No really, I’m not interested in writing specifications for the UI – that’s your job.
- We probably won’t even get 1% of the market with this product.
- Steve, this is Jeff, the product manager of product X, I’m just checking in to see if there are some upcoming demos you need done.
- Cool, only 40 unread emails since I left yesterday. Today is starting off great!
- No, I much prefer we launch 2 months later than planned
- Since we’re agile now we should be able to get to that in 9 months.
- I might have made a bad decision by deciding to launch with this minimalist feature set.
- Good news! It does appear that there is nothing interesting in this release for buyers, so no collateral re-fresh for us!
- Yeah! I get to do another custom presentation for a “big prospect”. Behind the scenes: Insert new prospect logo, search and replace customer name and create 1 slide based on my 2 hour overview from sales on this “unique” buyer.
- I’m pretty sure the product manager just made up those revenue targets and market sizing numbers.
- Shhhh, I just made up that stuff about seamless, enterprise class and scalable for the press release.
- So how exactly should I positively message the fact we accidentally introduced a production down defect in the new release to the whole customer base?
- No really, I look forward to sending those 4 emails to our customers this week, I’m sure they will understand how important our new release is for them by the end of the week.
- Absolutely I’ll sit in on a qualifying call with your prospect, just in case they have some questions about our vision on the products.
- Yup, I guess we did design that wrong.
- It’s theoretically possible that our customers don’t think a migration is a good idea.
- The leads y’all are bringing in are awesome!
- I know you really needed that deliverable for your launch, but I just decided to ignore it – sorry.
- I know you created some new slides, but I really just prefer using these ones from 5 years ago. Oh, the company name changed?
- There’s no way that can be done in 2 weeks, even in Ruby on Rails.
- I can get all that data and have the report for you this afternoon – does that work?
- No rush on the presentation, we can do it next week.
- I understand there are other salespeople which need stuff, let me know when you can get to it.
- We just had our budget approved with no edits and the CFO gave us an extra 10% for FY2011.
- Just tell me what to do, I like working here and I don’t even care if it’s a bad idea and tanks the business.
- At this early stage in the game how about we focus on cash and not revenue?
- You really think all the products are about the same? Hmmm, that might explain something.
- I’m not even sure I can close this deal in Q1 2012.
- Yes, I’m proposing we adopt a new code base because it’s the new cool thing. Did I mention we could do things quicker with “X”?
- A 2 hour pre-call review is a great idea and I really think we should invite those additional 8 people who aren’t going to be on Webex with the prospect for their input to the call.
What other things would you like to hear around the office?
