Overheard at a surprisingly dysfunctional startup: an MVP tale
How did it come to this, I wonder at this late hour. How did something so promising completely decimate my physical wellbeing, optimism, and weekend plans.
I had long been warned about the perils of joining a startup - as if listening to horror stories from burnt-out Fintech bros and ex-Elon slaves hadn’t been enough. But like the siren’s song, it was ultimately too appealing.
The pitch was easy: founded by folks from a top university, with funding from a notable VC fund and an emphasis on developer-first company culture (I realize now this describes tons of startups). The warnings were there too: first time founders with minimal industry experience. As any pessimist would tell you, the pitch never gets prettier, and the warnings only manifest into ugly realities.
This is my Minimum Viable Product (MVP) nightmare, if you had been eavesdropping on our company Zoom.
Have more confidence in you and your teammates.
In response to my asking if we should hire some full stack developers to our team of inexperienced, non-full stack devs, when we were assigned to build a full SaaS offering in two months.
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Can we do this (additional feature) in 4 weeks?
I don’t know. I doubt it.
Why not?
Because we have no experience doing this and it’s much harder than it looks. It requires us to do X, Y, Z which are not trivial even in the optimistic case, or make these tradeoffs.
We need to do this.
Now excuse me, sir, you can either ask for my opinion or not. You don’t get to completely discard my opinion afterwards because it doesn’t suit your agenda, at least, if you want me to consistently trust you.
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I don’t want to look bad in front of our advisor.
A C-suiter said in response to my comment that scheduling a demo of an unfinished MVP on Friday of the same week was unrealistic.
It’s really simple: if you don’t want to look bad in front of your advisor… don’t schedule a demo of an unfinished product! Now you expect us to move heaven and earth to hack something together. Also, you look bad. In front of us.
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Can you get this done by tomorrow morning?
I will give it my best shot.
I’m not asking you to give it your best shot - I’m asking you to commit.
Codename for: I’m demanding that you pull an all-nighter to get this working. You have to say it forcefully three times for full effect, of course. You never know when those slimy engineers will sneak in a nap or something.
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Why can’t you implement X and Y tonight? What’s so hard about it?
The fact that you have to ask “What’s so hard about it?” implies you know close to nothing about X and Y, and that you somehow think it’s easy to do. As any responsible engineer will tell you - adding features is always harder than you expect.
What you should take away is that I wasn’t lying about the whole “let’s hire a full stack engineer” thing. What I take away is that you’re now my textbook example of Dunning-Kruger.
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I still don’t understand what’s so hard about it. Let me take a look.
Famous last words before a "highly technical" C-suiter with no full-stack experience joined our late night grind for the demo, only to be useless for two hours. Credit to them for trying, I guess.
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I think the team has been underperforming - why did it take one week to get the demo ready?
In response to my suggestion that we need to be better about our deadlines, scopes, and workload, after we successfully salvaged the demo.
Maybe I’m just a human being, but being chastised for working my absolute hardest to meet an unreasonable deadline is pretty demoralizing. And worse, it tells me management cannot be reasoned with.
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Why does this (yet another feature request) take one week working full time?
That’s not what you asked me. You had asked me when it will get done, and I said in one week. What that means is, if you were to add this to our backlog of tasks, it won’t get done until one week from now (if you had read the design I drafted in anticipation of your comment, you might have seen my justification).
Since I’ve learned that you don’t like realistic deadlines, see Can we do this in 4 weeks?, it probably won’t get done in one week. And if I somehow do finish it in one week, I’ll get chastised for taking one week at all.
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Why do you all keep moving deadlines?
Oh, WE’RE moving the deadlines? Have you considered that you all set unrealistic deadlines, constantly redefined scope, and eroded trust between me and leadership?
No? I wonder how that’ll make you look in front of your advisor. I bet “my engineers keep moving deadlines” isn’t a valid excuse. In fact, it might signal to them that this startup is surprisingly dysfunctional.