Having to do the directing outside of the group, it is a harsh transition. I have to state things in non design, non product terms. But it has been a great learning.
iab, your sales driven organization sounds very different from other sales driven organizations I’ve worked with/for. For example, when I transitioned from Nike to Converse. Converse was a company pulling itself out of bankruptcy when Nike bought it and a few of us came over to help with the reset. It was very much a sales driven organization out of necessity to survive. It was hard to ween off that behavior though that was whatever the retailer says goes. The retailer was coming from a sense of what worked the last 6 months and we were pushing out toward what WILL happen in the next 6 months and what cane we MAKE happen in the next 24. Very different thinking that in my experience a sales team struggles with. And I totally understand why, they are focused on selling things we have now in the warehouse. That is where they are needed. By the time they want the product NPD is developing, the window to make it on time has already passed, so we have to take calculated risks and extrapolate from the known data points.