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The Startup CTO's Handbook

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Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#91

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

m104 wrote: post #35

Oh lordy, the "two crews" bifurcation fully written down. What a fantastic way to ship until it becomes far too expensive to ship anything good. Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer cre…

>Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer crew can't get enough resources to fully fix anything.

This is the PM's job - one or a few people who are deciding the vision of how all of the features fit together based on feedback by working with customers. Customers (esp. non-technical ones) will definitely not have a coherent product vision and only want immediate fixes regardless of what else may be planned. Customers may also not communicate to one another and their feedback can conflict.

If you put this burden on developer shoulders, they now have to manage all of that communication in addition to requiring technical skills to know the code base and maintain it well, on top of every developer needing to have the same coherent vision to make thoughtful decisions. That's now two to three jobs in one depending if your developers also manage infrastructure like many roles are requiring these days.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#92

Post by datadrivenangel »

Swizec wrote: post #21
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great approach. I ctrl-F'd for databases, good info there generally. The only thing that gave me pause: a startup doesn't need to focus on SQL vs. NoSQL in 2025 with such good json support in the most popular SQL databases. Just use PostgreSQL or MySQL -- whichever your engineers have more experience with -- use CloudSQL or RDS which will take care of the hard stuff like backups and replication for you, use read repl…

> use read replicas for BI with a good visualization tool Put up 2 or 3 read replicas, split your queries so writes happen to main and reads come from replicas (supported out of the box by many modern ORMs), and you can scale to millions in daily active users for most startup workloads. Really the hard part of BI is that folks who need the info don’t wanna learn SQL. The ones who can do SQL, will struggle to keep up…

The hard part of BI is application developers not wanting to support a stable data model and changing the schema all the time, often made harder by BI people not knowing what they want and being stuck with a brittle integration.

Add analytics reporting views in your app database as the 'API' is the way.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#93

Post by osigurdson »

film42 wrote: post #28

I read all the time about folks who become a VP/CTO and stop coding. Management skills are not coding skills. I know it. But I can't for the life of me figure out why folks hang up their keyboards and let their first super power go to waste. You can be a technical CTO from start to finish. Treat your team and the company like a service that needs active contribution, maintenance, and on-call support; and also, get yo…

Also, many start-ups seem to do fine without formal management structure up to 50 or more employees. The CEO / CTO is still coding, talking to customers, hiring, and making the product better.

Getting "all managery" in early stages seems like a huge misstep to me. The skills needed to successfully create a start-up are far more rare than those needed to be a good manager.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#94

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

DanielHB wrote: post #54
m104 wrote: post #35

Oh lordy, the "two crews" bifurcation fully written down. What a fantastic way to ship until it becomes far too expensive to ship anything good. Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer cre…

Related topic, but every company I worked at that had a platform team (as in a third-crew support team that manages tools/practices/common-code for a discipline) ends up being infested with over-engineering. They tend to attract that kinda of people who have disdain about delivering features and fixing bugs and like to over-abstract problems. Instead of fixing bugs they try to create increasingly complex abstractions…

This was the first place I worked at. The platform team became more and more insular and detached and more and more convoluted. As a result, things got harder to add on and soon they were telling the implementation teams that the features that the clients were requesting couldn't possible be needed. Million dollar contracts but no, you don't need to be able to put links into text blocks, that's a stupid feature and the client can't possibly want it.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#95

Post by SkyPuncher »

pyrale wrote: post #57
m104 wrote: post #35

Oh lordy, the "two crews" bifurcation fully written down. What a fantastic way to ship until it becomes far too expensive to ship anything good. Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer cre…

> It allows your feature team to remain 100 percent focused on the future, undistracted by customer support work. AKA "it allows your feature team to be completely oblivious to the horrors they unleash, and keep at it until the ship is solidly planted in the iceberg" Not talking about the conflicts it creates for merging between sales-supported feature teams and customer rep-supported maintenance teams. Given that th…

Further, I'm not sure what efficiency it provides overall. Is dedicating 20% of your team to support _that_ much different than the entire team spending 20% of their time on support?

We've actually found our quality goes up massively when we force our engineers to deal with the problems in the features they ship, directly with customers. We still have dedicated front line support (that rotates weekly), but they run off a playbook for common support needs then delegate everything else out.

It really sucks when you get pulled into support a feature you launched, but it really makes you want to build your next features better. Better internal documentation, better customer documentation, better UX/requirements, better edge case handling, etc, etc.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#96

Post by plomme »

marcinzm wrote: post #90
plomme wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book mentions having a rota: > Engineers rotate between the crews on a regular basis. The Microsoft blog post referenced above recommends swapping some team members between the two crews every week. In my experience this works well. With my current and previous client each team had a "hero of the week", whose responsibility was second line support and monitoring. If nothing came up the hero would work on their ta…

Isn't this just called on-call? That's very different from a separate team.

Maybe - though I associate being "on-call" with being expected to respond outside of normal business hours which was not the case in the teams I worked in.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#97

Post by franktankbank »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #94
DanielHB wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related topic, but every company I worked at that had a platform team (as in a third-crew support team that manages tools/practices/common-code for a discipline) ends up being infested with over-engineering. They tend to attract that kinda of people who have disdain about delivering features and fixing bugs and like to over-abstract problems. Instead of fixing bugs they try to create increasingly complex abstractions…

This was the first place I worked at. The platform team became more and more insular and detached and more and more convoluted. As a result, things got harder to add on and soon they were telling the implementation teams that the features that the clients were requesting couldn't possible be needed. Million dollar contracts but no, you don't need to be able to put links into text blocks, that's a stupid feature and t…

insular architect waves hands These are not the features you are looking for.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#98

Post by Aurornis »

DanielHB wrote: post #54
m104 wrote: post #35

Oh lordy, the "two crews" bifurcation fully written down. What a fantastic way to ship until it becomes far too expensive to ship anything good. Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer cre…

Related topic, but every company I worked at that had a platform team (as in a third-crew support team that manages tools/practices/common-code for a discipline) ends up being infested with over-engineering. They tend to attract that kinda of people who have disdain about delivering features and fixing bugs and like to over-abstract problems. Instead of fixing bugs they try to create increasingly complex abstractions…

That has been the fate of every platform team I’ve worked with in recent years.

Then they become gatekeepers, refusing to allow anything on their platform unless it conforms to their ideal vision. The catch is that their vision won’t be ready to use for 6-12 months, so you can’t deploy. Now your biggest problems aren’t engineering, it’s constant politicking to get around the platform team.

Add to this the concept of “architects” who don’t code but jump from team to team critiquing their work and you have a recipe for getting nothing done. One half of engineering is coding and trying to ship, and the other half of engineering is gate keeping and trying to prevent anyone from shipping

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#99

Post by marcinzm »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #91
m104 wrote: post #35

Oh lordy, the "two crews" bifurcation fully written down. What a fantastic way to ship until it becomes far too expensive to ship anything good. Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer cre…

>Look, when we break the feedback loop back to the people who wrote the software in the first place, they get happier for a bit, you make some other people sadder for a bit, and then slowly your feature crew never want to be interrupted or bothered again and your customer crew can't get enough resources to fully fix anything. This is the PM's job - one or a few people who are deciding the vision of how all of the fea…

What you're describing is exactly the opposite of every actually successful team I've seen, and describes every mediocre team I've seen. Silos are death and not just in a code base. Good developers understand the product. Mediocre ones churn out tickets mindlessly.

Re: The Startup CTO's Handbook

#100

Post by Aurornis »

film42 wrote: post #28

I read all the time about folks who become a VP/CTO and stop coding. Management skills are not coding skills. I know it. But I can't for the life of me figure out why folks hang up their keyboards and let their first super power go to waste. You can be a technical CTO from start to finish. Treat your team and the company like a service that needs active contribution, maintenance, and on-call support; and also, get yo…

At VP/CTO level you don’t have time to contribute and maintain code. If you do, the VP or CTO title is probably symbolic, like when someone is a “CTO” in a team of 3 at a startup.

The real problem is when people take early career roles that leave no time to code: They take architect roles where they just draw boxes on whiteboards and hop from meeting to meeting, or they accept a role labeled “tech lead” that is actually management in disguise.

They get comfortable not writing code and years pass until one day they need a new job. Now they have to interview for coding roles while confronting the fact that they spent a good portion of their programming career not writing any code. It doesn’t come back fast for many.

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