My non-technical co-founder/CEO (who has majority share) is constantly thinking of new features he wants us to deliver ASAP. The problem is, as we've kept building features, the system itself is getting less stable and we've accumulated cut-corners over time to deliver ASAP. We (the engineers) have made it clear that we need to spend at least a month or two refactoring, adding tests, and doing other improvements if we want to get the product to a level where we can successfully land & support a big customer.
Every time we find a stability issue & figure out a fix, he asks for LOE - if we don't say we can turn it around in a day or two he shoots it down and says we have too many features (which he just thought of to begin with in the last 2 weeks) to do.
A few months ago, we pushed back pretty hard and said after our next milestone, we need time to pause features & work on stability, and he said we would. Well, it's been a few months and now there are a bunch of new features we Need in order to be Successful. It's getting harder to believe since half of the features we did build get little to no use.
So what can I do? I've tried pushing back but it doesn't feel like my opinion on how I should spend my time & labor carries weight. I'm trying to slow down feature development by bundling new tests, adding missing tests, etc into my definition of done. But that feels like a band-aid and it's hard to improve things piecemeal like that.
Do you have any customers? Are you (and the rest of the team) getting paid?