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Epling: Sales engineering feedback loops are vital for technical product development

Jeremy Epling · The product wisdom every CPO should ignore | Jeremy Epling (CPO, Vanta) · Mar 19, 2026 · at 3:20

Jeremy Epling, CPO at Vanta, reflects on how working with sales engineers at GitHub shaped his understanding of go-to-market and product feedback loops.

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“When you're doing like a technical sale, like GitHub, you know, the SE team plays a huge part. Like AEs are critically important for setting up the relationship, navigating the org chart, doing all those pieces, but building that tight feedback loop of understanding practically what is working and what isn't each time they're going through the sales cycle and then how they're implementing with customers and driving that feedback back into the product.”

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