[jedberg]

> The only people who were in a gray area around promising product functionality that didn’t exist were founders.

I'd like to expand that to CxOs as well. I sat in lot of sales meetings with small startups where the founder or other non-founding CxO would promise new features, and then when we met with the engineers to do the requirements, they would tell us the feature was impossible or would take a year+ to build.

[makeitdouble]

I have been on the engineering side of this many times. I’s a judgement call: when it happens that feature was usually only a checkbox to be checked, had little effect on usage, and talking with the client we came up with alternatives as they realized it will never happen.

Of course, other times it was really important, and the client gets pretty pissed off, but I’d expect startup founders misreading their clients that much to not last long and get recycled pretty fast. Basically they didn’t even bother to dig in to understand why the feature was requested and where it mattered.