This article is the 1st in a series about startup product and engineering.
If you’re building a software company, one of the most important things to get right is… (drum roll)… building software. Yet building good software is among the most challenging parts of a tech startup. Most founders can hack together a minimum viable prototype that gets the job done for early customers. However, as more customers use it, that prototype typically breaks and becomes difficult to maintain. Therefore, it’s critical for startups to hire a great team of engineers and product managers to make that prototype scale.
Growing, organizing and managing a product and engineering team brings an entirely new set of challenges. The costs of getting it wrong are staggering: software bugs, instability and perhaps most acutely painful, not being able to quickly iterate on your product to get to product market fit.