| > We trusted our team blindly. What did you trust them to do? I feel like I hear this sentiment fairly often in the context of startup mistakes, and I wonder if people simply have unrealistic expectations. Developers write software, and they usually aren’t magicians. They can’t always turn poor instructions or bad ideas into world class software. I’ve worked on teams where the software we were building simply wasn’t great. It would never be great without some degree of pivoting and addressing a market more appropriately with better solutions. This was never a developer’s fault, though. In fact the team could be killing in terms of getting the work done that they were asked to. Even so it often came down on the software team to do better somehow. Numbers aren’t right, we need to optimize. We need to do the thing faster. Joey spent two weeks doing X, that should never happen! But even if Joey did X in two minutes, customers still wouldn’t be very excited. Organic growth would remain poor. Trials would not convert very well. Some developers have a good enough sense of the bigger picture, business, marketing, their own trade, etc. and they can provide feedback and insight that’ll potentially help change course. This is rarely true or even sufficient in my experience. Developers are only one of the cogs in the software machine. Did you team lie about their abilities? Did they falsely report hours worked? I’m really curious where your trust went and how you were let down. |
I am based out of India, and its hard to find good quality developers here that was another big learning lesson for me.