[bradarner]

The challenge is that you actually want your entire team to benefit from the feedback. The 4 of you are going to benefit IMMENSELY from directly experiencing every single pain point- together.

As developers we like to focus. But there is vast difference between "manager time" and "builder time" and what you are experiencing.

You are creating immense value with every single customer interaction!

CUSTOMER FACING FIXES ARE NOT 'MANAGER TIME'!!!!!!

They are builder time!!!!

The only reason I'm insisting is because I've lived through it before and made every mistake in the book...it was painful scaling an engineering and product team to >200 people the first time I did it. I made so many mistakes. But at 4 people you are NOT yet facing any real scaling pain. You don't have the team size where you should be solving things with organizational techniques.

I would advise that you have a couple of columns in a kanban board: Now, Next, Later, Done & Rejected. And communicate it to customers. Pull up the board and say: "here is what we are working on." When you lay our the priorities to customers you'd be surprised how supportive they are and if they aren't...tough luck.

Plus, 2-3 weeks feels like an eternity when you are on defense. You start to dread defense.

And, it also divorces the core business value into 2 separate outcomes rather than a single outcome. If a bug helps advance your customers to their outcome, then it isn't "defense" it is "offense". If it doesn't advance your customer, why are you doing it? If you succeed, all of your ugly, monkey patched code will be thrown away or phased out within a couple of years anyway.

[FridgeSeal]

Whilst I very much agree with you, actually doing this properly and pulling this off requires PM’s and/or Account Managers who are willing and capable of _actually managing_ customers.

Many, many people I’ve dealt with in these roles don’t or can’t, and seem to think their sole task is to mainline customer needs into dev teams. The PM’s I’ve had who _actually_ do manage back properly had happier dev teams, and ultimately happier clients, it’s not a mystery, but for some reason it’s a rare skill.

[bradarner]

Yes completely agree. This is hard for a PM to do.

I’m assuming that the OP is a founder and can actually make these calls.