[withinboredom]

I worked on a team that spent months designing an API, database tables, architecture, etc before implementing a single line of code. It was quite a different experience and we ended up with a far better product than we would have otherwise (faster too!). We also took three weeks working on planned work and then one week to work on “unplanned work” between iterations. “Unplanned” was basically anything goes. Fix a bug that annoyed you, refactor code because you wanted to be able to extend it later, etc.

We had a git repo that /only/ contained design docs and recorded decisions as PRs. Nothing was discussed “offline” so everything was recorded. In meetings we would make the final decision and actually merge the said PRs.

It was so different from working on any other project, and actually more fun.

Seriously give a team at your startup to try that route. I think you’d be surprised after a few months to a year. The quality of the work we output was light years beyond any other team at the company, IMHO.