Selling to practitioners vs. selling to technical decision makers
Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) commenting on Lobste.rs about how software products are sold:
For software solutions, there are two main groups: practitioners and technical decision makers (TDMs). Practitioners are the main users of a piece of software (and in the case of OSS, adopters, though not the case always). TDMs are the higher level management with budgetary discretion that are making broad stroke technical decisions.
The Redis landing page to me looks like a TDM-oriented site. And the "real-time context engine for AI" and AI focus feels correct for that target user.
You know the phrase "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM?" The thing about 90% of TDMs is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and NEVER THINK ABOUT WORK AGAIN. So to achieve all that, they follow secular trends supported by analysts and broad public sentiment. Oh, Gartner said that "AI strategy" is most important? McKinsey said "context" needs to be managed? Well, "Context Engine for AI Apps" is going to be defensible. Buy it.
On the surface, this might sound like a dismissal of TDMs as people who don't care about the job, but I don't think Mitchell meant it that way.
TDMs are doing their best with the information they have. They're paying attention to signals that are high quality in their estimation, but not necessarily high quality in the estimation of their technical co-workers. I personally would never use a Gartner report to make technical decisions, but in the same way the CFO at your company would never use a Hacker News comment to make financial decisions.
And you know what? It's okay if your CFO doesn't care about what Hacker News thinks about Redis. That's not their job. That's your job. Their job is to make sure the business doesn't go bankrupt.
If I want my company to pick Valkey over Redis, the onus for communicating that to management is entirely on me. It's my job to explain why it's valuable not just from a technical point of view, but also from a business point of view. Will it help the company ship faster? Save money on AWS bills? Build new features we couldn't build before? Will it help reduce liability, create better audit trails, onboard new engineers faster?
TDMs can't make good decisions based on information they can't parse, so it's my job to make sure they can parse the differences between two relatively similar products. If I refuse to do this job properly, the marketing department at Redis Ltd. will do it in a way that serves their business needs rather than mine.
There are economic, social, legal, and political dimensions to picking technology. It's never just about the quality of the product in isolation.