Splitting engineering teams into defense and offense

Don't do this to yourself.

There are 2 fundamental aspects of software engineering:

Get it right

Keep it right

You have only 4 engineers on your team. That is a tiny team. The entire team SHOULD be playing "offense" and "defense" because you are all responsible for getting it right and keeping it right. Part of the challenge sounds like poor engineering practices and shipping junk into production. That is NOT fixed by splitting your small team's cognitive load. If you have warts in your product, then all 4 of you should be aware of it, bothered by it and working to fix it.

Or, if it isn't slowing growth and core metrics, just ignore it.

You've got to be comfortable with painful imperfections early in a product's life.

Product scope is a prioritization activity not an team organization question. In fact, splitting up your efforts will negatively impact your product scope because you are dividing your time and creating more slack than by moving as a small unit in sync.

You've got to get comfortable telling users: "that thing that annoys you, isn't valuable right now for the broader user base. We've got 3 other things that will create WAY MORE value for you and everyone else. So we're going to work on that first."

> You've got to get comfortable telling users: "that thing that annoys you, isn't valuable right now for the broader user base. We've got 3 other things that will create WAY MORE value for you and everyone else. So we're going to work on that first."

Yes, but you've got to spend time talking to users to say that. Many engineering teams have incoming "stuff". Depending on your context that might be bug reports from your customer base, or feature requests from clients etc. You don't want these queries (that take half an hour and are spread out over the week) to be repeatedly interrupting your engineering team, it's not great for getting stuff done and isn't great for getting timely helpful answers back to the people who asked.

There's a few approaches. This post describes one ("take it in turns"). In some organisations, QA is the first line of defence. In my team, I (as the lead) do as much of it as I can because that's valuable to keep the team productive.