User experience is at the core of a tech company. When sales have concluded and your customer logs in, your product is what keeps them logged in.

Stickiness is not something you can sell, it’s something you can build.

After pulling the big guns out for the startup I poured myself into, I’ve been following the FFFO (Fail Fast Fail Often) principle. I think it’s saving me some future pain by taking the blows on the frontend.

I repaired the execution process of our engineering team to get a clearer picture of the lack of product definition and direction. After pointing our failings to the founders, I made it my priority to make headway on the hole as every engineer hates working on something that gets thrown away. I volunteered to take the helm has Head of Product. That’s when I ran into a core value on which the team and I were abrasively incongruent, product definition. To me one of the hallmarks of a successful startup is a clear product direction, to them, pivoting is what would steer the product. How do you know where to pivot? The customer will tell us? Oh my.

There is a school of thought that would like to focus on landing customer contracts before worrying about the nuances UX where proper product-market fit can be found. The logic goes something like “investors want to see a product out in the market with a few paying customers as a prerequisite for funding”, to which a reasonable reply may be, “are you willing to build a throwaway product that does not meet the needs of the early customers for the sake reaching early-stage financing?”. The risk is too high from my perspective. Customer churn, engineering burnout, investor uneasiness, it’s a multi-pronged strain on the team that will splinter relationships before the growth of the company even begins.

I would rather do things right than do things rushed. Fast does not have to mean rushed. Feeling liberated from inhibition due to my income independence from the outcome of this venture, I have found my true self. I speak and act when I see there is a need to in order to avoid mistakes I have made in the journey to build startups in the past. Because I do not hesitate to speak, for better or for worse, I have forced tough conversations to surface to the forefront of the team’s mind about company priorities and alignment. I’ve sought active collaboration on unearthing the fundamental truths that drive the organization, including cultural beliefs and user problem statements. I sought input from my wife as a UX Designer and we’ve had strong resistance to defining product.

The CEO is not even willing to walk me through the origin of his vision to help bring clarity to our product direction. The chief product evangelist is not excited by a cofounder’s interest in his/her ideas about product? I have been forceful on the issue because a strong engineering team without a strong product focus will build a system that will not scale with users, no matter how well architected – experience has taught me that much.

Now as my wife and I are tossed the hat of product amidst high risk, uncertainty, scrutiny, skepticism, and in questionable good faith, I am not confident that this venture is worth the war on product priorities. UX is not valued by the leadership, and therefore it will never be in alignment within the team. My efforts, if ever fruitful, would be in vain with this company as the odds are against me. We are in the trenches, and as a non-cofounder both in equity and in treatment, the challenge of establishing a culture of data-driven product shaping with a reluctant leadership does not motivate me as it may once have in my earlier startups. Internal alignment against all external odds is the battlefield that I’ll fight on. The energy drain from aligning the company internally will squander the productivity for our external obligations to the market.

In this trying time, I sought counsel from a valued mentor of mine who was concise and poignant with word choice, “you are describing a horse that I would not ride”. He made me see that I was confusing the hard choice with the right choice and that I needed to shift my frame of reference to decide what was right. The day before I chose to wear the invaluable product hat, our COO was on the hunt to outsource a Product Manager. My mentor repeated back to me the obvious fact that what I was valuing the most in the company was in the process of being outsourced prior to my volunteering. I was entirely blind to the truth before me and my mentor had me look carefully at what was being communicated from the leadership’s priorities.

My values do not align with the team’s values, it is clear that I cannot continue in good faith.