Thirty days in. Here's what I found.
Wasteer builds AI-powered waste monitoring. YOLO-based computer vision on camera feeds, waste classification, fill-level detection, operational reporting. The technical problem is interesting and well-matched to what I've been building for three years. The engineering situation was different from what the recruiting conversations suggested.
What the first week looked like
The architecture exists. The team is capable. The product is working in the sense that it runs and clients are paying. What's missing is ownership. No engineer owns a system end to end. When something breaks, the debugging process involves four people in a video call for two hours rather than one person who understands the component. This is not a team size problem. It's a structure problem.
Product has been making technical decisions. Not because they're power-hungry. Because the engineering team hasn't pushed back. The result is a backlog full of features that have no technical feasibility assessment, architectural decisions made in product meetings without engineering input, and a roadmap that is technically coherent in individual items and incoherent as a system.
The meetings are long. Three hours is not unusual. They're long because decisions that should be made asynchronously or delegated to one person are being made in rooms with everyone present. This is inefficient and a signal: low trust in individual judgment means everything requires group consensus.
What I'm not going to do
Blame the team. The situation is a product of how the team was managed, not who the team is. The engineers are good. They've been operating in a structure that didn't ask them to exercise judgment. They haven't atrophied. They've been waiting.
Fix everything immediately. Structural problems took time to develop and take time to unwind. Moving too fast produces disruption without direction. I'm spending the first month observing and asking questions before changing anything.
What I'm going to do
Assign ownership. Every system, every service, every significant component gets an owner. One person who is responsible for understanding it, keeping it running, and being accountable for its quality. This is not a burden. It's the thing that makes work satisfying.
Shorten the decision loop. Most decisions don't need everyone. The meetings are long because the decision rights are unclear. Making the decision rights explicit will make the meetings shorter as a side effect.
Get engineering into the roadmap process earlier. Not to veto product decisions. To make sure the technical implications are visible when the decisions are being made, not after they're locked in.
What I told the team on day thirty
The situation is fixable and worth fixing. The problem isn't the people. It's the habits. Habits are changeable.
The only metric that matters for the next six months is whether the team is making more decisions independently at the end than they were at the start. If that number is moving, everything else follows.
With gusto, Fatih.