After seven years of helping more than 200 Singapore early stage tech startups with their tech product development, our team has seen lots of issues that can trigger Oh-Sh*t moments.

Below are the most common struggles that many early stage tech startups face with their new tech product development.

While these struggles are most commonly seen among early stage tech startups, they sometimes (can still) happen in more mature startups. If your startup is developing or planning to develop a tech product, watch out for the three most common mistakes early stage tech startups make below.

Over-development

Often, founders, especially first-timers, spend too much time perfecting their products: they want to have all the great features in the first release, no bugs, and every design to be aesthetically perfect. However, what you think your customers need is likely to differ from what they really need. Worse, your customers often do not know what they really need until they actually have their hands on your product.

All these factors make the usefulness of all your white-board scrabbles and customer surveys very limited. So why bother wasting all your money and time developing what your customers do not need? For most startups, the cost of under-development is usually much lower than of over-development. Instead, you should:

• Develop only essential functions
• Release to the market as soon as possible to test the market
• Iterate according to actual user behaviours

Once you have launched your product to the market, you will have the best insights into what your customers really need and how much they are willing to pay. If we can point to a single most important factor that our successful clients have in common, it is speed.

Also Read: A multi-disciplinary approach to product development requires collaboration

Communication friction between business and tech

Expectations are the root of all heartache. Most tech people are not experts in communication and thus expectation management. This is not a big issue for more mature startups that can afford to hire product managers.

However, for early stage tech startups, to save money, CEOs tend to play the role of Product Managers as well.

Also Read: A multi-disciplinary approach to product development requires collaboration

Sales-driven, these CEOs often have unrealistic deadlines for tech people. Without any formal document to record all the specification and agreement, the writing of which is usually a job every business or tech person abhors, friction usually occurs when a feature is not as per the CEO “says” or deadlines are missed. Even if deadlines are met, software engineers may be forced to go for shortcuts, sacrificing the code quality that may backfire later on, hard.

Software engineers do it all

If you hung around job portals as much as we do, you would be unsurprised to see job posts that essentially go like this: looking for a software engineer who can design, code, test, write architecture documents, swim, dance, climb mountains, etcetera.

If we follow the 80:20 rule, 80 per cent of the time of software engineers should be spent on coding. But in reality, software engineers are usually forced to support customers, attend sales meetings, test their products, etcetera.

But wait, are software engineers supposed to test their products? Trust me, they will test but if you are really serious about getting a quality product, you should get dedicated testers and technical leads because if software engineers saw issues in their codes, they already fixed those issues, right?

So founders, please repeat this mantra three times so that we will not commit this sin again: “Software engineers are supposed to code only. Software engineers are supposed to code only. Software engineers are supposed to code only.”

In a nutshell

Many may find the above issues laughing stocks and other people’s problems. However, those issues are probably closer to home than many may think. Even more mature startups who are aware of the above issues tend to overlook them until it is too late.

Resonate with the above struggles? Share your story so that other founders can learn from your stories, too.

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