There's nothing wrong with working in sales! No kink shaming here.
Startups usually require people to wear several hats at once. That's normal. But suppose that your company grows to be 20 times larger. Would you still be working with customers or directing the projects to implement their requirements?
I’m far from the only staff level consultant at the company. Doing requirement analysis is considered “leading a project”. It’s a billable project assigned to a staff level consultant once sales brings in a customer and usually last 3-5 weeks.
While I’m considered a specialist for “cloud native applications”, I can pinch hit for almost any of our specialties at this level except for migrations.
Once the customer accepts the proposal, then leading the implementation is considered another project that is assigned to a staff level consultant. The “architects” (non staff) are the specialists that lead their “work stream” and are hands on and leading their sub team depending on the size of the work.
An implementation is made up of multiple work streams (epics).
You didn’t have to be mean :)
But the other half of my job is leading the project once the contract is signed