Involve sales people in tech projects, says Reed.co.uk CIO

Involving sales people in development projects means you're more likely to have a commercially viable product at the end, says Mark Ridley

Sales people should be involved in technology projects, especially where new products are being developed, according Mark Ridley, technology director of jobs website reed.co.uk.

Ridley told Computing that the importance of having commercial awareness in new product development was one of the lessons he took from one of his organisation's internal hack days, where new ideas and methodologies are regularly tested.

"One idea was to run a hack day with archetypes, rather than the normal job roles like developers and project managers. So we called someone a hacker, then we had a hustler, a creative and a visionary."

These roles, Ridley explained, came from his analysis of research from McKinsey and Quora, among others.

"We analysed this research to try to work out what's the perfect start-up team. So we said a hacker is broadly a full-stack developer, almost a mini-CTO. The creative will be a designer, possibly focusing on the front end. The visionary is potentially the CEO role - it's the person with a clear idea of what needs to be achieved.

"And a hustler is the person who has the ability to sell, to be able to pick up a phone or stand in front of people. There's a tendency in technology to think sales people are a completely different species - and potentially they are - but the importance of having someone with those skills in any project is critical," explained Ridley.

He said that the hustler role added so much value to technology projects that now sales people are involved early on in all development projects at reed.co.uk today.

"Now we involve sales people very early in projects, because they're the ones who can tell you if a product will sell. You can give a developer almost any project and if they love it they'll continue to work on it, but you can't give a sales person something that won't sell. They won't just fall in love with the product, they want to know what their targets are and how they can make money. So the demands of just having a sales person in the team make any product much more commercially focused right from the beginning."

Ridley was ranked at number 33 in Computing's IT Leaders 100 list 2016.