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No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams | Antoine Boulanger

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Sharing a reluctant, "node & postgres" approach to engineering management for early-stage startups

▶ Addendum 1/15/2026 This article is for early-stage (Seed, Series A) founders who think they have engineering management problems ( building eng teams, motivating and performance-managing engineers, structuring work/projects, prioritizing, shipping on time ). The gist: if you think you have these problems, it is likely that the correct solution is to do nothing, to not manage, and to go back to building product and talking to users . Put another way, and having managed teams at all scales, I don’t think it’s a good use of your time as a founder to be "managing" engineers at such an early stag

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