How to help non developers accept the complexity of a task

Hi, I’m looking for a bit of advice here in terms of communication skills.

A bit of context: we are a 10 people start-up company and we have two developers, one robotics and one software(Me). The product owner and development manager is by training a mechanical engineer, and he is directly in charge of prioritization of tasks. Around this we are two other engineers, one electrical and one drone.

The problem and frustration that I personally experience and that we all have, is a lack of communication in terms of what work needs to be done and what we need. Often we have situations where the development manager wants to implement a feature which in our current setup is not possible because we did not future proof/properly designed the architecture to handle these logic changes. When I try to explain this lack of flexibility we have I can’t get my point across and the reason I think is that I can’t make the other engineers comprehend the need to remodel and do code maintenance. My suggestions are met with disbelief and a lot of times they have the attitude that I am looking to fix problems which for them is not a problem, but they don’t have the knowledge to actually argue back. What usually happens is my requests for maintenance are dismissed and I get pressured to fit a circle in a square space. After which another feature comes along and we do the same thing.

What can I as a developer do to improve this process for them? I understand fine that it is a business need to push features quickly and be agile, but this agile thing is abused and taken as an excuse to jump over steps which are otherwise critical even if it is a prototype.

Any help would be appreciate!

Edit: I want to say thanks for everybody that contributed to this discussion. Lots of valid points from different perspectives. The two main approaches I see poping up is to first factor in the maintenance into every task. To that end I would have to have my own acceptance criteria of done without beeing overly pedantic. The other is for larger rebuilds where whole model needs to be changed for that part I have to argue the reason why we need it, the problem is that even then I can be ignored from what I see as a priority and then pressured into working on whatever the product owner pushes. To that end I would advise anyone to preserve their sanity, have a clear conciousness and ne sure that you did everything that was in your controll and you are not to blame for any issues lateron.