Ask HN: Issues of a Growing Startup?
- features are moved from research to production in a rush. No analysis of what is to be done is performed, tickets are created 1 week, max 2 weeks before release and the person chosen to work on it needs to figure it out by herself asking around.
- there is a lot of micro-tasks that are requested horizontally from Engineering team member to Data Scientist (and vice-versa). This is probably due to the problem above, too little analysis is done before estimating the ticket and people are left alone to figure out what to do. This creates a lot of stress.
- junior (and sometimes senior) members of the Data Science team do not use the product and are not interested or even aware of the mission/strategy. This creates a divide between their thinking of what is needed to do (more advanced ML in their opinion) and what is needed to grow the business and the product
- Engineering team is split into areas of the tech stack and not into areas of the product. Those teams have separate stand up and the Data Scientist team has their own stand up. I think Feature teams would make sense but the management disagrees (reason is we are not that many and most work this year will be around improving the infrastructure).
At this point I am asking myself if this is normal in a startup that is starting to grow or there are some worrying signs here. Have you been in a similar situation? What did you end up doing? How did the company change?