As only developer in company, how to argue what you do and why it takes so long?

#1

Post by blyce » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 10:39 AM UTC

I really made it to the first (and at the moment only) employee for a startup. So I'm kind of co-founder, CTO, product owner and the whole development team at one position. The company is profitable from day 1 (having the first 20 customer contracts signed up for a long term period), but we've not received any VC capital yet and we're not yet having any bugdet to hire more people.

I'm the only tech guy in the founders group and I don't know the other co-founders very long (maybe half a year now).

So, my daily work now consists of developing, meeting with the other co-founders and... let's call it "administrative work". I hope, people will know what I mean with that - answering questions from customers, explaining to co-founders why feature XYZ, what he just had as an idea will not work etc. And then there are a lot of ongoing changes in the initial requirements (I know - thats normal), that are taking some time to thing about, adapt the initial architecture to that and so on.

I made some cost estimation for the product development and there are so many things left to do that I estimated the whole product to be ready at the end of the year (so that's around 10 month left) and I now have to explain to the others why it takes so long, how to accelerate it (my answer "hire additional people" - their answer "no budget yet" ;-)). Not the big problem yet, because I already created a working prototype (or should I call it MVP?), but that was created by me in a few weeks as a side project, but now it's really hard to explain, why the complete rework with all the feature changes will affect in a longer development time.

So, what should I do with that problem - having much administrative and planning work to do on the one hand and having a bunch of things to get developed on the other hand? All the business guys are heavily focused on sales, sales, sales - but I always told them: The development team has to scale with the sales!

Re: As only developer in company, how to argue what you do and why it takes so long?

#2

Post by i0nutzb » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 10:54 AM UTC

For me it kind of sound you are more of an employee, less of a founder (or at least you described yourself as that).

Daily meetings are usually toxic; having more than 10-15 minutes for a meeting per day sounds like a lot of wasted time for me (and usually this kind of meetings are good in an agile workflow: the daily standups).

Also, hiring additional people may not always work; adding manpower to a late software project makes it later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

Re: As only developer in company, how to argue what you do and why it takes so long?

#3

Post by csixty4 » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 3:06 PM UTC

I agree with i0nutzb. If you're a "co-founder, CTO, product owner", the buck stops with you x3. It sounds like they see you as none of the above.

Re: As only developer in company, how to argue what you do and why it takes so long?

#4

Post by sharemywin » Mon, Feb 23, 2015, 7:33 AM UTC

maybe you should look at a more agile release schedule. At the least show the progress every 2 weeks with a demo. but ideally you slowly rework the MVP with 2-4 weeks releases. You might also want to look at what you can scale back. Does the system really need re-architected? Will it hold for another 50-100 users? Will that sales level support a bigger development team? IMHO, your job is to do just enough development to support the current business plus a few months in the future. what 2-3 features can your users absolutely not live with out deliver those. if you have to spend a couple hours longer deliver something because of shitty architecture so be it. if you have to rent another server to support another 50 users because the code isn't optimized so what.