Expose your engineers to the customer

Suppose you have a team of engineers, let's say about 10 or so. Are any of them talking to the customer? Or do they at least get unfiltered customer feedback?

If not, you're making a mistake.

I know a lot of people end up advocating for two teams, where one team is not "bothered" by the customer and develop features in isolation, whereas the other (engineering) team spends time catching customer support requests and triaging bugs.

I've personally been part of orgs where there was no rotation, i.e. engineers were permanently assigned to a specific team.

This enabled the team not "bothered" by the customer to spend weeks, if not months, really perfecting features, with 100% code coverage, perfect unit tests, and endless discussions about implementation details.

We call this yak shaving.

The result? Once the features did land in the hands of customers, which itself took a very long time, the team was isolated from the fallout, since the customer support team handled all issues.

This will cost your startup velocity, and it will cause your engineers to lose focus of the actual, daily goal: To develop features for the customer. They pay the bill, so it should work flawlessly for them.

Yours,
Søren