1 min lesson
Who you serve: developer, platform, leadership
Say what this means in practice: "Use the wrong language in the wrong room and you lose credibility instantly."
Step 1 of 3
Inside one account you're selling adoption to three different rooms and they want three different things. Use the wrong language in the wrong room and you lose credibility instantly.
The JD calls for cross-audience communication for a reason: an SA who can only talk to engineers stalls at the platform-review stage and one who can only talk to executives never gets developers to actually open the tool. You need all three registers.
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Advanced table
Same product, three buyers. Each has a veto, so you must earn all three
- Audience
- Individual developers
- What they actually care about
- Does it make my day better? Is it fast? Does it respect my workflow? Will it write code I'd ship?
- How you win them
- Hands-on enablement on their real repo; show Tab and Agent on their code, not a toy demo.
- Audience
- Platform / DevEx / infra
- What they actually care about
- Governance, security, standardization, integrations, admin controls, blast radiusHow much breaks if a change goes wrong; the scope of potential damage. Press Enter for the full definition..
- How you win them
- Architecture review, admin/SSOSingle Sign-On. One company login (usually via SAML or OIDC) instead of a separate password per tool. Press Enter for the full definition./SCIMSystem for Cross-domain Identity Management. A standard for automatically creating and removing user accounts when people join or leave. Press Enter for the full definition./RBACRole-Based Access Control. Granting permissions by role rather than configuring each person individually. Press Enter for the full definition. walkthrough, MCPModel Context Protocol. A standard that lets an AI agent pull in context from outside the repo, like Jira tickets or internal docs. Press Enter for the full definition. into their internal tools, a rollout that's controllable.
- Audience
- Engineering leadership (CTO / VP Eng)
- What they actually care about
- ROIReturn on Investment. The value gained versus what it cost, the language an economic buyer funds deals in. Press Enter for the full definition., talent impact, risk, whether the AI-native bet pays off strategically.
- How you win them
- Impact metrics tied to business outcomes; a credible adoption narrative and risk posture.
| Audience | What they actually care about | How you win them |
|---|---|---|
| Individual developers | Does it make my day better? Is it fast? Does it respect my workflow? Will it write code I'd ship? | Hands-on enablement on their real repo; show Tab and Agent on their code, not a toy demo. |
| Platform / DevEx / infra | Governance, security, standardization, integrations, admin controls, blast radiusHow much breaks if a change goes wrong; the scope of potential damage. Press Enter for the full definition.. | Architecture review, admin/SSOSingle Sign-On. One company login (usually via SAML or OIDC) instead of a separate password per tool. Press Enter for the full definition./SCIMSystem for Cross-domain Identity Management. A standard for automatically creating and removing user accounts when people join or leave. Press Enter for the full definition./RBACRole-Based Access Control. Granting permissions by role rather than configuring each person individually. Press Enter for the full definition. walkthrough, MCPModel Context Protocol. A standard that lets an AI agent pull in context from outside the repo, like Jira tickets or internal docs. Press Enter for the full definition. into their internal tools, a rollout that's controllable. |
| Engineering leadership (CTO / VP Eng) | ROIReturn on Investment. The value gained versus what it cost, the language an economic buyer funds deals in. Press Enter for the full definition., talent impact, risk, whether the AI-native bet pays off strategically. | Impact metrics tied to business outcomes; a credible adoption narrative and risk posture. |
Same product, three buyers. Each has a veto, so you must earn all three.
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Optional practice
Practice: Who you serve: developer, platform, leadership
QA platform/DevEx lead asks why they should standardize on Cursor across teams. What concerns should your answer hit and what's the failure mode to avoid?