2 min lesson
Why this role is hard (and why that's the point)
Work through the cases in "Why this role is hard (and why that's the point)", pairing each signal with the move that fits.
Step 1 of 2
The honest pitch: you're selling an AI code editor to the same kind of engineers who build advanced AI tooling, inside a company that's flat, fast and still building its own commercial playbook. The difficulty is the moat - anyone can carry a mature enterprise bag, but few can earn technical credibility with a CTO and co-create the motion at the same time.
Name the real challenges before the loop, because the values and panel rounds reward candidates who can speak to them without flinching. Hand-waving the hard parts reads as either inexperience or spin in a truth-seeking culture.
You sell to developers, VP Eng and CTOs who build software for a living.
Low fluency about AI coding and the competitive set gets you dismissed in minutes.
The #1 enterprise blocker for any AI coding tool.
You must handle “is our code trained on?” with specifics, not reassurance.
Pricing, packaging and process are still being built.
You co-create them and act as the customer's voice back into a product-led org.
Copilot, Windsurf, JetBrains AI, Claude Code and others move quarterly.
Positioning shifts, so you re-learn the competitive story constantly.
There's a fifth difficulty that's easy to miss: being the customer's voice inside a flat, engineering-dense company means you have to earn credibility internally too. Product and engineering won't take your word that a feature matters because you said a customer wants it - you bring the evidence.