There's not one specific question I'd ask to figure that out. Depending on how the conversation goes it might be asking about the background of the founders, or their plans for the coming months, or how they assess their threats.
There's not one specific question I'd ask to figure that out. Depending on how the conversation goes it might be asking about the background of the founders, or their plans for the coming months, or how they assess their threats.
If your role is in engineering you may be at the mercy of failures which you have no control over. I've found those to be the most frustrating and stressful periods in my career.
Watching another department make bad choices or have poor skills/work ethic without being allowed to go in and correct it myself was very painful. Especially being in a small organization.
The idea of going somewhere where the biggest blockers to success are under your control makes a lot of sense if you have confidence in your ability to execute.
I was really talking about how frustrating the proximity of that failure I could not control was. In a larger or more stable organization, when a different department is failing of struggling, you can at least have confidence in the future. That eventually those people will either improve or move on to something that might be more appropriate for them. Or possibly be replaced with people that are better suited for the task at hand, and things will get back on track.
When I was involved in high stress early companies, where founders and early sales employees are often unlikely to be removed, it can be a especially difficult to deal with emotionally. At some point you are forced to chose between sinking with a ship you are not permitted to save, or bail on something you've poured so much work into.
Product development rarely provides features that can be self fueling for marketing/sales. Brands rarely need killer product features they need a targeted story.
It is much easier to have a successful company without a product than it is to have a successful company that trys to use product features as a marketing department.