This implies that the incentives are any saner when driven by sales, which isn't necessarily true. At least on the enterprise end (which is presumably where GCP wants to make a significant chunk of its revenue), sales can be equally driven by what's essentially "ship shiny", it's just that the rewards are even more immediate (collect commission).
Salespeople will gladly hound engineering teams to pound out an MVP for whatever their particular prospects want this quarter, and a shiny MVP is often enough to close a deal so long as it holds up in a demo with managers whomever has purchasing power. Once that's done, sales is happy to forget about that product, or at least convince themselves that it working in a demo means it will work well in production (they lack the technical competence to see the inevitable holes that will appear down the road if the MVP isn't developed past minimum viability).
If next quarter's customers want a different set of features, well, sales will push for those, often to the detriment of fleshing out existing functionality or ensuring they're stable and maintainable. They're insulated from any pain that results from half-baked products if the people tasked with actually using products aren't those with purchasing power, and in the enterprise context, they usually aren't, and are themselves insulated from line workers who could tell them they've essentially bought a lemon, or more the promise of functionality instead of actual functionality.
Salespeople will gladly hound engineering teams to pound out an MVP for whatever their particular prospects want this quarter, and a shiny MVP is often enough to close a deal so long as it holds up in a demo with managers whomever has purchasing power. Once that's done, sales is happy to forget about that product, or at least convince themselves that it working in a demo means it will work well in production (they lack the technical competence to see the inevitable holes that will appear down the road if the MVP isn't developed past minimum viability).
If next quarter's customers want a different set of features, well, sales will push for those, often to the detriment of fleshing out existing functionality or ensuring they're stable and maintainable. They're insulated from any pain that results from half-baked products if the people tasked with actually using products aren't those with purchasing power, and in the enterprise context, they usually aren't, and are themselves insulated from line workers who could tell them they've essentially bought a lemon, or more the promise of functionality instead of actual functionality.