Ouch, that hits close to home, and it seems like it does for a lot of others out there as well.

So what's the solution? Is there a playbook that avoids these pitfalls, or is it just the cost of the spin. Ideally, something early engineers can point to when we see non-technical founders falling into familiar traps.

My personal take:

- you need aligned incentives across the board. Sales and accounts mustn’t promise what the company can’t deliver

- people need to defend their area of expertise whilst listening to what others are saying about theirs. For me this boils down to a division between technical and business focussed. Techies need to push for non-client facing technical improvements without making everyone ignore them every time they say “technical debt”, and they need to accept that sometimes you just build shit to get business through the books. Sales/accounts need to accept that sometimes the build budget is taken up with mysterious technical drives that will be worth it. When I say “must accept” I mean accept that it must happen some percentage of the time - each case still needs to be backed up by a business case.

- ultimately this needs to come from the top - founder(s) must balance these facts and drive it through the whole organisation, and in the article they didn’t

If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?

For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.

Take it as a mental exercise.

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