
Ask HN: How to stop constant march of features as a co-founder - bloataway69
Background: I am a technical co-founder who has been working on a startup for a while now.<p>My non-technical co-founder&#x2F;CEO (who has majority share) is constantly thinking of new features he wants us to deliver ASAP. The problem is, as we&#x27;ve kept building features, the system itself is getting less stable and we&#x27;ve accumulated cut-corners over time to deliver ASAP. We (the engineers) have made it clear that we need to spend at least a month or two refactoring, adding tests, and doing other improvements if we want to get the product to a level where we can successfully land &amp; support a big customer.<p>Every time we find a stability issue &amp; figure out a fix, he asks for LOE - if we don&#x27;t say we can turn it around in a day or two he shoots it down and says we have too many features (which he just thought of to begin with in the last 2 weeks) to do.<p>A few months ago, we pushed back pretty hard and said after our next milestone, we need time to pause features &amp; work on stability, and he said we would. Well, it&#x27;s been a few months and now there are a bunch of new features we Need in order to be Successful. It&#x27;s getting harder to believe since half of the features we did build get little to no use.<p>So what can I do? I&#x27;ve tried pushing back but it doesn&#x27;t feel like my opinion on how I should spend my time &amp; labor carries weight. I&#x27;m trying to slow down feature development by bundling new tests, adding missing tests, etc into my definition of done. But that feels like a band-aid and it&#x27;s hard to improve things piecemeal like that.
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edimaudo
Might be worthwhile having a conversation with your co-founder. Ask him to
focus on the key features which will drive the revenue. For every new feature
there has to be a critical number of users that need the product not just one
offs.

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gus_massa
How many cofounders are there? How is the equity split? 55%-45%? 60%-40%?
95%-5%? Do you have that in written?

Do you have any customers? Are you (and the rest of the team) getting paid?

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runawaybottle
I really don’t see how you expect to stop this realistically. This is the
modus operandi of stakeholders at every organization.

