The Most Important Resource In Any Startup is Engineers' Time
It's what enables everything else
The critical resource in any startup is engineers’ time. It enables you to achieve any outcome you want, be it profit, revenue, MAUs, more features, better UX, scalability, or all the other outcomes you could probably want.
Unfortunately, many startups don’t realise this — they waste engineers’ time. And in many ways:
They demand that engineers take on more initiatives (at the high level) or individual tasks (at the low level) than they can handle, causing engineers to get bogged down and get less done, just as an overloaded truck breaks down.
They ask engineers to build features without thinking them through, resulting in a feature that doesn’t have much value.
They don’t coordinate dependencies such as product and UX, and have these change significantly after engineers have spent a lot of time coding, resulting in a lot of rework.
They interrupt engineers mid-sprint, destroying their focus.
They let sales and support people message engineers randomly, instead of filing a Jira ticket to be looked at next sprint.
They let multiple stakeholders — founders, designers, sales, support, marketing — message engineers directly, instead of going through an engineering or product manager, who I’ve heard described as a shit umbrella.
They’re impatient when a project is taking a while, and ask engineers to put in a short-term hack, which amounts to doing double work.
They don’t start projects ahead of when they’re needed. They start them in the last minute, and rush, which takes more person-hours than if you did it in an orderly manner. This is like ordering from Amazon in the last minute, which will force you to choose Express delivery, which costs more for the same product.
They’re myopic, and fixated on reaching the next milestone at any cost, ignoring technical and process debt that slows down the team in the medium term of a quarter or longer. This is like living off your credit card, which is awesome — until the bill comes.
They build custom features for each customer, rather than building features in a reusable manner.
They don’t understand dependencies of the form “If you do X, you don’t need to do Y.” For example, one startup I know had technology wasn’t scalable. Instead of making it scalable, they spun up different instances of their service for different customers. This resulted in more DevOps work. But when a single high-traffic customer came along, they couldn’t accommodate that customer. If they had invested in scalability instead of spinning up another datacenter, they’d be able to accommodate the high-traffic customer and have less DevOps work. Startups often don’t think this through: “Instead of doing X, can I do Y, which gives me the benefits of X plus more?”
They come up with custom pricing plans for different customers. One startup I know had 40 plans in Stripe! This baggage exacts a cost on the team, just as carrying a lot of luggage in your car hurts fuel efficiency.
These are all the ways in which startups don’t value their most important resource — engineers’ time.
Sometimes, founders say, “I can’t optimise for engineers’ time; I have to optimise for X”. But engineers’ time is the fuel that lets the startup achieve X. So that’s like saying “I have no time to refuel my car; I have to reach Chennai fast.”
After squandering engineers’ time, stakeholders wonder, “Why am I not getting enough done?” And not getting enough done ultimately results in not achieving business goals, leading to failure.
Want to avoid these problems?
True plenty time of Engineers are lost unnecessarily due to mediocre systems thinking, what is really missing is efficiency and focus of the engineer to realize product excellence in production.
Due to this reason, we do see every product on fire in production and most of the engineer’s time is lost in firefighting, debugging to do further patching.
Time to reverse legacy IT services management style from top-down to bottom-up impact analysis, to clearly note the IT Waste and IT Rework, that is eating engineers productive & intellectual time.