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Having worked on the support side of this dynamic, mostly in problem and incident management, I have honestly seen 12 months of product roadmap completely blown

by emmp 6y ago

Having worked on the support side of this dynamic, mostly in problem and incident management, I have honestly seen 12 months of product roadmap completely blown up by stability issue after stability issue that our support staff could not possibly workaround. It's really corrosive to the morale of the support staff to just be unable to do anything to help. In my case this was a relatively mature company on a version 2 reimplementation of an existing product, so it wasn't a complete death sentence. It eventually led to a complete house cleaning of CTO and product management in the end though. But, the company sure didn't fail!

nmfisher 6y ago
> In my case this was a relatively mature company on a version 2 reimplementation of an existing product, so it wasn't a complete death sentence. OP specifically referred to startups, though, not mature companies. Most startups only have 12-24 months' runway to begin with, and lacking clean code/testing/best practices/etc won't (usually) kill them in that timeframe. Lack of product-market fit, on the other hand, is the one thing guaranteed to kill a startup in that first year or two (lack of financing is the other, but this is usually fixable if you've addressed product-market fit). It's why startups spend every single developer hour on rapid prototyping/iteration/features, rather than refactoring, testing and stability. It's not black-and-white, though. Some code is so bad that it costs time in the very short-term, because noone can figure out how it works. Some functionality is so central to the product that tests are needed to confirm it's actually functioning as intended. There's a vast spectrum between "fully tested, clean, reusable code" and "held together with sticky tape and segfaults every other minute". I'd say that the one key skill for a startup CTO is deciding where the team should be on that spectrum on any given day.

by emmp 6y ago

nmfisher 6y ago

> In my case this was a relatively mature company on a version 2 reimplementation of an existing product, so it wasn't a complete death sentence. OP specifically referred to startups, though, not mature companies. Most startups only have 12-24 months' runway to begin with, and lacking clean code/testing/best practices/etc won't (usually) kill them in that timeframe. Lack of product-market fit, on the other hand, is the one thing guaranteed to kill a startup in that first year or two (lack of financing is the other, but this is usually fixable if you've addressed product-market fit). It's why startups spend every single developer hour on rapid prototyping/iteration/features, rather than refactoring, testing and stability. It's not black-and-white, though. Some code is so bad that it costs time in the very short-term, because noone can figure out how it works. Some functionality is so central to the product that tests are needed to confirm it's actually functioning as intended. There's a vast spectrum between "fully tested, clean, reusable code" and "held together with sticky tape and segfaults every other minute". I'd say that the one key skill for a startup CTO is deciding where the team should be on that spectrum on any given day.