Engineers like to hire engineers (and designers/product people). I think its because the utility and scope tend to be pretty obvious and you can always see more and more to build. As a founder with an engineering past (although you never stop being an engineer!), I always find it a bit trickier to hire the non technical parts because you need to do their jobs first to really know what you need and generally, you need to navigate more ambiguity in an area of the business where you have less training and experience. That said, for the right products and business, you can probably get a way with borrowing resources from engineering for some marketing - I find that engineers with high EQ often make great digital marketers assuming they have some creative/content generation skills because they can really tune ads and think about the whole funnel in a very technical and numerical way. I have also found that it helps to have entirely nontechnical for the creative and advertising as well as there are a lot of places where engineers just can't always see past their engineering goggles.

"Product people" is a very generic term, which likely includes some of what you mentioned.

Fair point. But if after 2 years you haven't found a business model, it might be better to fire couple of the product people and get dedicated biz people, as opposed to waiting 5.5 years and then go belly up.

Out of curiosity, do you have direct experience with entrepreneurship? This is extremely easy to say from a distance, and so naturally everyone does, only to bite their tongue once they've gone through it.

I've built a few companies. I think it's super valuable to have some on the team who doesn't give shit at all about the tech and only cares about a) is this the right problem and b) who cares (read: pays).

This person helps you focus, forces (if given authority) the tram to focus on "things that move the needle". Devs and designers simply lack that customer-development focus.

I think every team would benefit from a qualitative analysis role like this - regardless of title. I have one now. We argue every day, but the balance of perspective is key.

Autocomplete just gave away your European origin.

> Devs and designers simply lack that customer-development focus

That’s an unfair generalization. They will have that focus if imbued on them by the company, and the right motivated hires are made.

Alameda, CA now in Seattle.

Me generalization is made from 20ish years as a dev who's now a CEO and was doing a bunch of hiring along the way.

You said my generalization was unfair, and carved out a narrow exception where it would be great. Maybe proving my point.

Query...does your dev team talk about tooling and stack more than customer feelings?

Is it "ohh react native on k8s" or fix the accounting reports and that one UI bug that tricks users into click the wrong button because some eng forgot to use the UI green constant?

The latter for sure. The platform is a nuisance and not a source of fun, and priorities come from product. But I’ve never worked in the US, things might be different. What I was trying to say is that people will adjust to the culture/goals of the workplace. It might be true that an engineer left to its own devices would not care, if it doesn’t affect his performance; but if it the company is clearly focused on the customer everyone will follow.

My comment was regarding “tram” ;)

Yes, 100% at my Co now, we are (not just lip service) customer focused. After some bumps we got a new dev, was unhappy at the old places, specifically about that empowerment. Now the customer to dev feedback loop it tight and they are enjoying it - and it shows from the contribution.

Fair question, I totally get your point. But yes, i've been full-time entrepreneur since i was 19. 6 companies, 20+ years, and lot of mistakes by now.

I do -- founder of a funded company with customers -- and my observation is it's very very difficult to bake a business model into a business after the fact.

And fwiw, a founder friend with a successful exit counts his biggest mistake as not having a founder immediately focused on sales. He built a two-founder (PM, eng) business that had a successful exit but probably nowhere near as successful as could have been possible.

1:1 engineer to product person ratio seems off to me, especially for a small company. Even if that person has to do product/sales/evangelism/marketing, you should really need 2 or 3 people max if you only have 4 engineers, especially when those engineers are building so much from nothing.

I wouldn't say our "Product people" are very traditional product people, you have our bios and focus in the team link in the post and below. Hope it helps

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2...

If the business model won't be acquired, then business folks won't count towards asset. Better to let them go or emphasize relevance to product development going forward.