Been there, made all the mistakes. In small fin-tech startups no less. My advice, assuming you have some sort of product market fit: 1 Clean up shop. Set expec

Been there, made all the mistakes. In small fin-tech startups no less. My advice, assuming you have some sort of product market fit: 1 Clean up shop. Set expectations & bounds. Throw out your backlog. Tell everyone you will release one BIG THING and X minor bug-fixes every month. Your job is to give the engineering team enough space to do their job well (including refactoring, compliance, security etc). And its their job to make sure that one, well specced, well sized BIG THING releases on time. 2 Business team, with your help, has 12 attempts a year to try to release features that will significantly up the growth/revenue of your company. Make yourself available to them to learn more about the customer and business needs and spec out your BIG THING each month. This has to involve a huge amount of actually talking to customers. If not, its pretty much guaranteed to fail. Seems basic but theres a lot packed into the rational, like: - Non-tech folk don't know what a big thing is, so you have room to play and overdeliver (important for your engineering team moreso than you). - Reduced feature throughput generally means you only focus on those features that tilt the needle. Cant underestimate how important this is! Esp if your a fintech startup. Our products are notorious - 5% of features account for 99% of usage. - Reduced feature throughput also allows you to spend longer speccing / talking to customers & business teams reducing the risk of mid-development scope creep or problems on release.