SE's are really smart, but are they like rocket scientists ? Over the weekend my YouTube feed delivered a real gem from one of my favorite channels. Many of you may be familiar with the Everyday Astronaut. Tim Dodd and his team create excellent content, and I highly recommend it if you like space information. The video that really got me excited is a recent interview with Elon Musk. Elon has become a bit of a controversial figure, and I’m certainly not a fan of everything he says and does, but this conversation about how he approaches the design process with SpaceX was very interesting.

I just spent a great weekend camping with my son and his Boy Scout troop, and reflected on the perception of Boy Scouts from a hiring perspective. I was never a scout, but I always had a very specific set of things that came to mind when I heard about Boy Scouts or Eagle Scouts. As a person who hires a lot of people, when I met folks that were Eagle Scouts, I had a set of common expectations that would spring to mind immediately - loyal, trustworthy, respectful, friendly, etc. But there is one aspect of Scouting that I did not fully appreciate - leadership.

For this installment, I wanted to address the sales reps on behalf of our SE community. As an SE leader, a good part of my job is to help out with being an ESM / SE 'marriage counselor' so I wanted to try and articulate a few things that for various reasons are difficult to communicate for a lot of SE's. I think everyone agrees that a trusting and productive relationship between ESM and SE is super critical, and maybe a few ideas here can just help bring voice to some things to help out - some of these may be a little controversial, so please feel free to chime in with disagreement in the comments.

Great companies get started with initial SEs that are true Rock Stars. You give them your software guitar, some idea about a melody, and awesome results happen.

As an SE organization scales up, one of the key milestones is the installation of additional "layers" of leadership. This can take on a lot of different looks, but in general I think the approach and definition of how front line SE leaders work is absolutely critical to successfully scaling an SE organization.

Most every company I have worked for will stand up in a kickoff meeting or QBR and a sales leader will say "The SE organization is the most important part of our sales organization, and is critical to our success". Experienced sales leaders know it is important to shine the spotlight on this team to help with morale. However, I think the actions of those leaders often align more with building a team of SE's that are designed to just show up and answer the questions and do the demo instead of being a strategic asset for the company and the customers.

Great SE's are a very unique combination of technologists, customer advocates, and sales professionals. In the best case, SE's work closely with their sales partners to collaborate on opportunities and help their potential customers understand the value of a solution, and not just show up and do the demo.