Working for a startup with about 9 people employed We just had a Series A (I don’t even know how). Our ceo has business background and got an MBA from Ivy League. She can certainly sell things, and has done that. However she drastically underestimates how long things take. She oversells, if not straight out lies to the clients, and has promised some outrageous things.
We are a team of 5 junior developers straight out of collage (yes no seniors!!!). We are supposed to build a whole webapp for a heavily regulated industry in around 4 months. Not an MVP, but a whole functioning webapp, where we would get sued for millions if some data leakes (if the webapp got hacked for example). She also does not understand why we can’t work on a compleatly different AI project paralell to the webapp (which we can’t because of the tight deadline). Our clients believe that we have worked for a year on the webapp, when we are just starting (that’s what she told them).
My questions:
what the fuck?
That’s a good question. In such a situation, there is probably not a lot you can do except tell her she absolutely must/should hire a CTO.
Additionally, make sure you have an “insurance” in the form of a paper trail: Whenever she says to come up with feature XYZ, provide an estimate how long it takes in written form. Later on she cannot blame you guys for not having told her, you actually have proof. If you want, you could also do that as part of a an architecture decision document. That’s unusual as the document is not meant for that, but together with the architecture decisions you have a captured each and every rationale why you think building XYZ actually takes so and so long. When I manage projects with a moderate to high degree of complexity I typically add 20% - 40% overhead time to my high-level estimates for the “unknown unknowns”. I know that stakeholders typically don’t like that, but we all know that projects follow the 80/20 principle.