Most startups don't lose months because engineers are slow.
They lose months because they're solving the wrong problem.
A feature gets requested. The team estimates it. The tickets are written. The sprint starts. Weeks later the feature ships. Nothing changes.
Not because the implementation was poor. Because the underlying assumption was wrong. The customer didn't need the feature. The bottleneck wasn't where the team thought it was. The real problem remained untouched.
I've seen engineering teams spend six weeks moving quickly in the wrong direction.
I've also seen teams create more impact in a few days simply by identifying the actual constraint before writing code. That's why some of the highest leverage work an engineer can do happens before implementation starts.
Good engineering begins with questions: What outcome are we trying to create? What problem are we actually solving? How will we know if this worked?
The answer is rarely hidden in the codebase. It's usually hidden in conversations, assumptions, and incentives.
Technology is expensive. Building the wrong thing is even more expensive.
The most valuable engineers I know don't start with implementation. They start with understanding.
Because the cost of misunderstanding compounds far faster than technical debt ever will.