Be careful what you wish for

Most CEOs fight to keep their product initiatives market-driven, and yearn for the day that their product groups will completely understand and support their companies' sales initiatives. After all, it's hard to go wrong by letting sales drive almost everything in your business. Assuming that the sales you are making are profitable and fit with your overall business strategy, you'll want to make sure that nothing gets in the way of closing them. On the other hand, product groups can collapse under the weight of requests for enhancements -- spending all of their time responding to sales and customer relationship managers. Worse yet, your product can end up being a collection of tactical fixes and lose its long-term strategic value to your company.

Let your vision drive both sales and product development

The best solution to this is to make sure that everyone -- in sales, product development, and customer relationship management -- is driven by the same vision. Problems often occur because one group or another doesn't really understand your ultimate objective. You want your product group to be responsive to sales, but you also want your product manager to make decisions based on your strategic plan (and not someone else's). Whenever a request comes through, he needs to be able to know whether it fits with the plan and have a constructive discussion with your sales manager about any issues.

Make sure that your entire team understands the triage process

If you think that business is war, then you should easily see how the triage process can be applied to product development. It's in everyone's best interest to make sure that the most critical product modifications be "treated" first and that the rest go on a list to be addressed as time permits. The trick is getting everyone to agree to a set of rules and sticking to them. It doesn't do any good for the product team to embrace triaging of product requirements if the sales team refuses to comply. And you certainly don't want your engineers flooding the product development queue with cool new features, unless they are driven by sales requirements.

Make small corrections to the sales-product interaction before it gets out of whack

There's a very fine line between your product being driven responsibly by sales and rendering your product group ineffective. You'll want to stay close to the edge -- on the side of sales and customer concerns. Let your sales team drive the process, but don't let them drive your product group into the ground. You'll also want to make sure that your product team has the flexibility to make sound decisions based on your strategic objectives and that it can exercise the powerful creative force your company needs to remain competitive in the marketplace.