Fair point. But if after 2 years you haven't found a business model, it might be better to fire couple of the product people and get dedicated biz people, as opposed to waiting 5.5 years and then go belly up.
Out of curiosity, do you have direct experience with entrepreneurship? This is extremely easy to say from a distance, and so naturally everyone does, only to bite their tongue once they've gone through it.
I've built a few companies. I think it's super valuable to have some on the team who doesn't give shit at all about the tech and only cares about a) is this the right problem and b) who cares (read: pays).
This person helps you focus, forces (if given authority) the tram to focus on "things that move the needle". Devs and designers simply lack that customer-development focus.
I think every team would benefit from a qualitative analysis role like this - regardless of title. I have one now. We argue every day, but the balance of perspective is key.
Me generalization is made from 20ish years as a dev who's now a CEO and was doing a bunch of hiring along the way.
You said my generalization was unfair, and carved out a narrow exception where it would be great. Maybe proving my point.
Query...does your dev team talk about tooling and stack more than customer feelings?
Is it "ohh react native on k8s" or fix the accounting reports and that one UI bug that tricks users into click the wrong button because some eng forgot to use the UI green constant?
The latter for sure. The platform is a nuisance and not a source of fun, and priorities come from product. But I’ve never worked in the US, things might be different. What I was trying to say is that people will adjust to the culture/goals of the workplace. It might be true that an engineer left to its own devices would not care, if it doesn’t affect his performance; but if it the company is clearly focused on the customer everyone will follow.
Yes, 100% at my Co now, we are (not just lip service) customer focused. After some bumps we got a new dev, was unhappy at the old places, specifically about that empowerment. Now the customer to dev feedback loop it tight and they are enjoying it - and it shows from the contribution.
I do -- founder of a funded company with customers -- and my observation is it's very very difficult to bake a business model into a business after the fact.
And fwiw, a founder friend with a successful exit counts his biggest mistake as not having a founder immediately focused on sales. He built a two-founder (PM, eng) business that had a successful exit but probably nowhere near as successful as could have been possible.
