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How do I deal with upper management's overfixation with frontend/aesthetic/visuals?
Cutting the story very short, I got into the unlikely position of CTO in a small company just by sort of being the only developer at some point in time, but actually having no abilities nor experience in leadership or management. This means I'm constantly acting as the buffer between upper management (CMO, CEO, COO) and the tech department, but also most of my time is to be dedicated to development. Currently, we're about to finish what I consider the most important project ever done for the company (replacing all legacy systems, which solves a lot of issues by itself and unblocks many further improvements) which has spanned throughout a little more than a year. The problem we've been carrying for some time is that upper management is overly fixated with improving the visuals, aesthetics, and frontend of our applications, which means these have been getting consistently prioritized over maintenance, security or performance concerns, which, on the other hand, have been given for granted like they should have never been concerns to begin with. We're currently at a delicate point since this is a very important task that's going to wildly affect the company (which by the way, has been growing greatly for several years), but most of the work is on the backend, and thus we have nothing to show for it. This means we're being consistently pressured to finish sooner and incentivized to cut corners as much as possible to meet some very arbitrary deadlines. I even have the belief that upper management might be thinking we're slacking off because we haven't shown any aesthetical changes, even though I'm consistently putting more than 100 hours a week into it. This is really bringing myself and other team members to feel really burnt out. The tipping point was the latest meeting where I was given a list of "very important issues that MUST be definitely fixed before release". This list is composed exclusively of aesthetical changes, minor translation changes, using different stock images, etc. At this point I just realized I can't let this go on for any longer, since I've had to cut corners throughout the development in stuff I considered important, however this banal stuff is somehow ESSENTIAL for the release. I know that at this point there's little more to do than scheduling a meeting and discuss expose the situation exactly as I'm doing now, and even flat out refuse to perform these changes unless the deadline is extended. But I'm curious about what could have I done before to prevent reaching this point. Is there any way I can convince upper management that we're actually working and making progress even though we're not producing any sort of "visual" outcomes they could see?
Cutting the story very short, I got into the unlikely position of CTO in a small company just by sort of being the only developer at some point in time, but actually having no abilities nor experience in leadership or management.
This means I'm constantly acting as the buffer between upper management (CMO, CEO, COO) and the tech department, but also most of my time is to be dedicated to development.
Currently, we're about to finish what I consider the most important project ever done for the company (replacing all legacy systems, which solves a lot of issues by itself and unblocks many further improvements) which has spanned throughout a little more than a year.
The problem we've been carrying for some time is that upper management is overly fixated with improving the visuals, aesthetics, and frontend of our applications, which means these have been getting consistently prioritized over maintenance, security or performance concerns, which, on the other hand, have been given for granted like they should have never been concerns to begin with.
We're currently at a delicate point since this is a very important task that's going to wildly affect the company (which by the way, has been growing greatly for several years), but most of the work is on the backend, and thus we have nothing to show for it.
This means we're being consistently pressured to finish sooner and incentivized to cut corners as much as possible to meet some very arbitrary deadlines. I even have the belief that upper management might be thinking we're slacking off because we haven't shown any aesthetical changes, even though I'm consistently putting more than 100 hours a week into it.
This is really bringing myself and other team members to feel really burnt out.
The tipping point was the latest meeting where I was given a list of "very important issues that MUST be definitely fixed before release". This list is composed exclusively of aesthetical changes, minor translation changes, using different stock images, etc. At this point I just realized I can't let this go on for any longer, since I've had to cut corners throughout the development in stuff I considered important, however this banal stuff is somehow ESSENTIAL for the release.
I know that at this point there's little more to do than scheduling a meeting and discuss expose the situation exactly as I'm doing now, and even flat out refuse to perform these changes unless the deadline is extended. But I'm curious about what could have I done before to prevent reaching this point. Is there any way I can convince upper management that we're actually working and making progress even though we're not producing any sort of "visual" outcomes they could see?
