> But an engineer can't help but also factor in "i'm the one that has to build this, so how much extra work am i giving myself?

I wonder how many startups have failed because the tech has been too much of a pain in the ass to maintain and the technical staff burns out and leaves, with more and more expensive developers postponing leaving till as late as possible and doing as little as possible

Conflict of interest is exactly how I term it as well. Tech people with good product sense have to work very hard to override their engineering instincts or they’ll handicap the product.

I’m guilty of it all the time. What helps is remembering that absolutely nobody gives a shit about the code or the architecture. Nobody. It really doesn’t matter. They just want an awesome product.

(Which isn’t to say none of that matters, because it does. We are engineers and know the consequences of shitty technical decisions… it’s just that you have to pull yourself out of that mode when thinking of what needs to be built)

>"who has the least conflict of interest"

What about "what role needs to be done the most at the time?"

>sometimes I'm legitimately better at the strategy half too

Technical people should be eager for more business responsibilities than ever before starting a business.

If it's an "engineering company" ideally you would have two founders each having outstanding technical abilities, and far exceeding anything a non-technical alternative could bring to the table from a business or sales aspect. To begin with if you want to start a business, you need to be the kind of engineer that wants to build sales in some way or another. On the front lines and/or in the background.

And to be real one of you is going to have to go full-time into sales & marketing to pursue some type of cash flow until things get rolling in some way. At least.

Then you can more sensibly consider having the non-tech MBA type come in under the top engineer who has been successfully selling already. And that's the beginning of a chain-of-command where an "engineer" is never hired or fired by anything other than an "engineer". And there's always an engineer (sharp in business, not lacking anything needed) at the top of any non-tech hierarchy by design.

Non-engineering companies where the non-tech-types dominate the hierarchy, can still have decent opportunities for the engineers they hire to work on projects under them. But there may not be as much room for upward movement or appreciation for outstanding skill up and down the line. Might also be more often found involved with financial irregularity, or more commonly non-fair dealing even with some of their own people sometimes.

> It's true that many engineer-designed products are terrible

Selection bias from there being too many avg UI open source tools?

Engineer-designed = low budget = no expertise on UX etc.. but product fulfills their purpose.

I don't think this is a conflict of interest.

Every feature, design decision, and iota of technical debt are money and time. Either that's raised and spent up front, eating at equity, or it is deferred until a point where revenue pays for it, it is redundant due to a pivot, or becomes so essential that new funding is raised (possibly from a pool that doesn't dilute so much value).

Presenting an accurate and fair cost / benefit analysis of these tradeoffs (at least on the technical side) is the main purpose of a technical lead. Non-technical business people can't get that information on their own. They should have a say in the decision if it materially affects the product's launch, but that's the normal give and take.

>> But an engineer can't help but also factor in "i'm the one that has to build this, so how much extra work am i giving myself?" so they're design will be a compromise of what's good for the user and what can be built easily.

The PM/Strat component is like a fifth or tenth of the tech work, typically. Every product design decision often has a magnitude more of associated implementation work. The only way i'd go with this setup is if the PM/Strat person if one of these things:

- PM/Strat person already has customers lined up

- PM/Strat person has paying partners lined up

- PM/Strat person has had exits with associated aura

- PM/Strat person puts in upfront $ to compensate the tech person

- PM/Strat person takes a way lower equity

>> they're primary skill is that they have a great "product sensibility" that engineers lack

Sounds a lot like what comes up when you google "Rick Rubin meme"

OTOH, I regularly come across great engineers who seem bad at picking projects, and who don't seem to get any better at this over time.