Why product & engineering is insufferable

The founder’s guide to avoiding technical rabbitholes

Hi all —

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be working on the next version of “PMF Camp”. The first version had a 94 NPS. 65% of attendees rated it as “the best thing they’ve ever done for their startup.” Still, not satisfied, so I’m pulling together the next version to make it 10x better.

Join the waitlist at PMFcamp.com, or email me here!

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Today’s topic is a brief one, given you’re receiving this the morning after Thanksgiving and we’re both in food comas…

Product Development. How do you build the right product, fast, without spending a ton of money?

An investor sent me this and said it was very much “my vibe”:

I feel seen.

On reflection, product development should be easy. Just build what customers want, really fast, right? Why is it so hard?

It’s so hard because software is complex. The REAL problem is that “complexity” is an excuse for not focusing on customers.

Because there are a million permutations of potential technical solutions, you often get pulled into esoteric system-design rabbitholes and totally forget about customers.

You can spend months, quarters, even years down these technical rabbitholes. This gets more likely the more engineers you hire, and when you add explicitly “customer-facing” roles like product managers. “We need to maximize the amount of time engineers spend coding,” you’ll say. And you’ll scratch your head when your product is technically excellent yet commercially impotent.

Modern engineering teams will, generally, take any excuse not to focus on customers. “We need to address technical debt,” or “That’s Product Management’s responsibility.” Worse: “We hit our sprint goals; sales needs to sell more.”

If you’re hearing these kinds of things, you’ll feel compelled to use the prioritization, alignment, and communication frameworks from the midwit meme above as a solution. Don’t. This kind of bureaucracy compounds ceaselessly. The “Gordian knot solution” is to make it unacceptable for engineers NOT to work 1:1 with & understand customers.

This isn’t some magical, impossible ask. If your engineers argue, they shouldn’t work at a startup. Send them to big tech where nothing matters.

I’ve worked with engineers who are EXTREMELY customer-focused. MuukTest’s CTO, for example, pinch-hits in sales. He deeply understands their customers as a result, and their product direction is highly intuitive. (Their engineers work 1:1 with customers all the time. It’s not rocket science.)

This frustration led me to create the “evolution of software engineers” for startups, which I leave without further comment: