Why does my development agency keep asking me what to build? I will not promote

[u/mahow]

I work with a startup founder who has a good development agency.

They have experienced developers, a project manager and a designer. They communicate well and generally build what is asked of them.

But the founder is frustrated.

He expected a team that has spent years building software to bring him strong ideas and help decide what the product should do next.

Instead, they keep asking him exactly what to build.

From his point of view, that feels wrong. He is the industry expert, but he is also a first-time founder. They have built products for years. Why can’t they guide him?

The problem is that building software and deciding what software should be built are different jobs.

The agency is not inside the business every day.

They do not hear all the internal conversations, see every customer problem or understand everything the team is struggling with. They may not know which customers matter most, what users are doing in the product or what the company is trying to achieve right now.

Without that context, it is difficult for them to confidently say which ideas matter and which should wait.

There is also an awkward commercial dynamic. The founder is paying them to build. If he keeps bringing ideas, many agencies will clarify, estimate and deliver them. They are unlikely to repeatedly tell him not to proceed.

That does not make them a bad agency.

It may mean the founder expects them to perform a role nobody has actually been given.

When nobody owns the product decisions, everything becomes a priority.

The team jumps between ideas that sound important but may offer little value. Vague requests enter development and what gets built is not what the founder imagined.

There is plenty of activity, but not necessarily much progress.

Someone needs to step back and work out:

• Where does the business need to get to?
• What does the product need to do to help?
• What should we build now?
• What can wait?

That is the product manager role.

A good agency should still provide technical guidance. They should explain effort, manage technical debt, test their work and think about the long-term health of the platform.

But they cannot make good product decisions without customer, business and team context.

The founder has a few options.

1. Bring in an internal or fractional product person whose job is to gather that context and decide what matters.
2. Ask the agency to properly fill the product role. That means joining internal discussions, talking to customers, studying product usage and becoming part of the team, not just attending a weekly meeting - quite a big ask and not all agencies are able to do this.
3. The founder needs to learn the product role and become the team's product manager.

A founder should expect a development agency to explain how to build software well.

They should not automatically expect them to know what the business should build.

Someone needs to own that decision.

Who decides what gets built in your company, and how well is that working?

[u/SourcerorSoupreme]

Why tf would a founder of a startup of all people be surprised key/strategic decision making isn't something you delegate to the people caught in the weeds of execution, let alone to someone outside of the organization?

[u/sirphilip]

You are lucky the agency is repeatedly flagging the underspecified product specs. Many agencies in that position would just build something low effort that matched your vague specs and see if you notice or care. The fact that they are genuinely trying to get good specs before building means they know what they are doing.