| You sound like a really smart, engaged employee. I would absolutely not try to 'fix' this in yourself. Advocating-for customers, fellow employees, technology to solve specific business problems—is the quickest way to progress to senior or staff level engineering positions. Sure you need the engineering chops, but my experience has been that applying those skills in the context of business goals is the quickest way to climb the ladder. In your case it sounds like you need to be willing to engage with the founders on the field they care about, which is business goals. Their metric of success (downard trend of x) is a good focus for early stage startups. Over time, there will be other metrics that will become important and one of those is going to be customer acquisition channels. The holy grail of acquisition channels is customer referrals. Do you have NPS surveys at your company (or some other proxy of 'I would love to refer you to other customers')? If you do, I would take a look at what those scores look like, which will help you engage your boss with something like: - Our NPS score for key customer X is in the shitter, do you think that means we should focus more on bugs so that we don't get a bad reputation? How do we think about NPS vs feature count in a situation like this? Or if NPS is still good, you have grounds to feel better about the bug situation. Sure it's not good, but you can feel good that you are spending your time in other impactful ways. If NPS is not a thing yet, advocate for it. One way to do this might be to engage with your boss / founder. I would suggest simply asking how they know when you have met your goal of supporting x number of features. Or if they don't have an answer to that, how they think through when other metrics might become more important. If they go into customer acquisition, marketing, etc, it would be a natural and good time to advocate for NPS or some other form of engagement with your customers so you can discover how to harness them for future growth. Sorry for the novel. This is basically a long winded way of saying it's not something that needs fixing in you. Business is a big chess game of strategy. If you want to feel better about it, the best way is to continue to engage your boss/founders on the business goals and to help them think more clearly about the tradeoffs you are making as a tech team. |