Last Tech Tuesday I wrote about how engineering led companies sometimes underrate the importance of marketing and sales. One of the comments on Twitter pointed out that the converse is also often true and I replied that I will write a post about that, so here it goes. Many companies founded by a pure business team tend to struggle with technology and fail to deliver the products or services they envision. There are at least three distinct failure modes that I have seen here over time.

The first are teams that outsource their initial technology development entirely. By this I mean that they don’t have a truly technical person on their own team. This hardly ever works. I am sure people will post examples of successful counter examples but most of the teams I see who fall into this category are struggling mightily. Some of them fail to ever ship a product. Others ship something but it is delayed and a far cry from what they had in mind. Based on lots of experience my clear and unambiguous advice here is: if you don’t have a technical member of your founding team stop everything else you are doing and find somebody (I will have a separate post on how to do this). In many situations you would be better off not continuing at all if you can’t do this and instead take time out to learn enough technology yourself to build an initial version.

The second are teams that add a technical person early on but always treat engineering as a substitutable appendage to the company cycling through many engineering leaders and accumulating massive technical debt along the way. Things may look like they are going well initially, but over time the product development cycle for companies like this starts to slow down dramatically as the technical debt makes innovation harder and harder. Churn in the engineering organization also means that there is less institutional knowledge about why things were built in a certain way to begin with.

The third are teams that bring on board a technologist but then proceed to let that person build an engineering fiefdom that’s disconnected from the rest of the organization. The failure mode here tends to be an over-engineered solution that invests heavily in technological infrastructure before having found product market fit. There may be no technical debt here in the classical sense but it generally won’t matter because many of these companies never really get off the starting blocks. 

The root cause in pretty much all of these situations is a lack of understanding of technology. It is unfortunately easy to go through business school and/or work on the business side of startups or large companies without ever developing any meaningful understanding of technology. That, however, is a recipe for mismanaging technology as it will translate into a fear of engaging and an inability to ask the right questions. If that happens to describe you, then you might want to go and read Tech Tuesday from the very beginning.