SaaStr

MARCH 12, 2025

A smaller number of high-quality leads that convert at higher rates is vastly superior to a flood of poor-fit prospects. You assembled a talented team, built an amazing product, and established a growing SaaS business. Mix in the classic conflict between sales and marketing teams, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Sales Hiring 197

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 197

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 20, 2018

I came to Intercom from a company with a culture of heavyweight engineering processes. From an engineering perspective, it successfully kept you focused on coding. Processes have to serve the development of the product. No separate QA team. It was a well-oiled machine with battle-tested and often updated procedures.

Engineering 212

Engineering Underperforming Technical Team Innovation Consulting 212

Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 15, 2018

As a startup scales, the importance of infrastructure engineers simply can’t be overstated. They’re the ones making sure your app is secure, that uptime looks good, and that the rest of your engineering org has the right tools to build features your users need and want. The tenets of foundation engineering at Stripe.

Engineering 214

Engineering Management DevOps as a Service Merchant Services 214

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

For the very first time, we’re releasing Engineer Chats , an internal podcast here at Intercom about all things engineering. Previously hosted by Jamie Osler , a Senior Product Engineer at Intercom for over seven years, it’s now up to Principal Systems Engineer Brian Scanlan to pick up the baton and keep the chats going.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Systems Review 178

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 12, 2021

As a support leader, you already know how important it is to take care of your customers – but it’s just as important to take care of your support team. Here’s why human support is so crucial for any customer-centric organization, and how it can have a significant impact on your team, your business, and your customers. Here’s why.

Underperforming Technical Team 222

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Payment Methods Payments 222

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

How To Build A High-Performing Team And Retain Top Talent. Every leader needs to have a strategic playbook to build high-performing teams and retain top talent,” says Guan Wang, Global Director of Market Intelligence for Snowflake. . Stage 3: Employee Development. The Playbook For Building And Retaining A High-Performing Team .

Underperforming Technical Team 246

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Acquisition Company Culture 246

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

You know how everyone says you'll never look and wish you'd kept a bad VP as long as you did? Because to scale, you are going to need to add a true management team, and then a second one, and then layers of management. The fewer weak hires they continue to make. The less they slow down feature development.

Sales Hiring 269

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 269

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Conrad personally runs payroll for Rippling’s 2,000 employees across a dozen countries as a “part-time job,” while UK companies with even small teams often spend 5-6 days monthly just managing payroll. His rationale: Training capacity : Sales teams can only absorb so much product knowledge. The proof of effectiveness?

Startup 157

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 157

SaaStr

JUNE 4, 2021

Pomel focused his session on: Making your SaaS startup customer-centric: Hw event marketing has helped him integrate his engineering and sales teams. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? We hired everybody on our teams. We can look back at how Datadog scaled.

Scale 317

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 317

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

I hope this post allows people and teams to safely talk about Product Judgment. If you ever had to face a Manager, Director or Exec as they make bad product decisions and you’re struggling to persuade them otherwise, this post will help you. It takes years to build, and therefore ranges from very weak to very strong.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2021

From premature optimization to over-engineering solutions for your product, it’s easy to get caught up in making technology decisions that slow you down instead of speeding you up. Similar to Kubernetes, unless your team already has a lot of experience with microservices, most startups shouldn’t go near them.

Technical Review 269

Technical Review Scale multi-cloud Kubernetes Scaling 269

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

As it turns out, he’s also quite the writer – since the last time we spoke , he has published not one but two books on engineering. After writing An Elegant Puzzle about the challenges of engineering management in high-growth organizations, his focus shifted to a career path that’s much less understood – the technical leadership track.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

SaaStr

JULY 10, 2021

So let’s take a look back to a deep dive with the CEOs on what they learned building their first senior teams: ———-. As a founder/CEO, building your first management team is something that you often lose sleep over. What makes you feel that you need to level up your management, set up your first management team?

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 261

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. I did all sorts of things there from sales, to project management, to running the engineering team, hiring. This is where I got my chops in growing and scaling enterprise sales teams. We have team selling here that extends beyond the sales team. Want to see more content like this? Good afternoon.

Scale 288

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 288

User Pilot

DECEMBER 31, 2024

While your product managers use our analytics reports to track product usage, your engineering teams can use our session replays to uncover bugs, and your customer support team may use our in-app help center feature to offer self-service and reduce support tickets. Userpilot is perfect for non-technical teams.

Technical Review 105

Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Onboarding 105

BetterCloud

MAY 13, 2025

Every IT team is grappling with the same reality: the ever-widening chasm between the demands placed on IT and the resources at their disposal. Automated systems, on the other hand, can provide continuous vigilance, ensuring consistent application of security updates and proactive identification of potential weaknesses.

Headcount 52

Headcount Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 52

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 14, 2018

Looking for an example of a happy, high performing product team? I hosted Laura on our podcast to learn everything from why assembling a great product team is like pulling off a heist, to tips for improving collaboration and marrying business needs with user goals. If you enjoy the conversation check out more episodes of our podcast.

VP of Engineering 190

VP of Engineering Underperforming Technical Team CTO Coach New CTO 190

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 11, 2020

And while seeing this work come to fruition, Sam, a Product Engineer at Intercom, was inspired to find more ways to get involved. My team’s lead engineer stopped what he was doing and announced to the all-male room, ‘Looks like the token female engineer has arrived.’ How we rethought our terminology.

Technical Review 289

Technical Review Software Review Systems Review CTO Hire 289

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2020

Lexi Reese, Gusto COO uses her 20+ years of experience to provide advice on building high performing teams using authenticity, empathy and logic. Lexi explains the importance of team trust, driver and passenger mindsets, and much more. I think the foundation of high performance teams is that they share five things.

Scale 241

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 241

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

The good news is you have a big backlog, and the bad news is you have a big backlog. Adam came up with the wildest idea he could think of for an app and used Anthropc, a large language model company, to help develop the idea. All these developers will have agents to help them write faster and faster. What’s the data model?

Generative AI 293

Generative AI AWS Artificial Intelligence AI 293

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 1, 2022

They are hiring leaders, building teams, and attracting advisors in the US while devouring the SV SaaS playbook. AI is likely the next platform, dev tools are strategic given the scarcity of developers, cybersecurity is front and center for enterprises, and the data stack is still going strong. Proximity to customers helps too.

Scale 293

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cybersecurity 293

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Their goal is to build a cohesive revenue engine with ever-growing disjointed parts. That’s why I’ve built out the Revenue Engine Framework to help drive you to success. Revenue Engine Optimizers Focus on the Entire Customer Lifecycle. PEAS explains the what of the Revenue Engine. This is the how of the revenue engine.

Technical Review 137

Technical Review Development Team Review Systems Review Engineering 137

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 293

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 293

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 7, 2024

He previously built the pre and post sales solutions team at mParticle from zero to supporting hundreds of enterprise customers. Should your sales engineers also implement the software? to be the sales engineer during the sales process and then stayed on with customer post sale to manage the implementation process.

Underperforming Technical Team 121

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 121

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 2, 2024

But with all the bad comes so much good : the ability to share your life and work with billions of users all over the world, an outlet for creative expression, the possibility of monetizing your passion, and, perhaps, the most important of all: the ability to share and connect with family and friends.   Content, poof. Audience, bye-bye.

Social Media 112

Social Media Underperforming Technical Team Government Blockchain 112

SaaStr

JUNE 19, 2024

The three core areas to focus on are: Evolving your growth engine Building and solving for when to become a multi-product platform Investing in your people and team #1: Evolving Your Growth Engine Let’s start with some context for Bitly’s journey. You might have to rebuild your marketing team. And you know what?

Scale 300

Scale Scaling Underperforming Technical Team User Experience 300

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 26, 2022

In today’s modern age, support teams simply need to redefine what being “personal” means. But with the development of automation, like bots and contextual help content, we’ve significantly changed our perception of what being personal means. If your team is pondering whether to use “bots versus humans?” What will they choose?

Underperforming Technical Team 209

Underperforming Technical Team Customer Support Scaling Development 209

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 13, 2019

As the head of our Support Ops team, I work daily with my teammates to develop automated solutions that don’t frustrate customers, but empower them. They can also route customer conversations to the team best equipped to handle their questions and can even provide answers to simple customer questions like, “How can I add more users?”.

Underperforming Technical Team 279

Underperforming Technical Team Customer Support AI Headcount 279

Stax

MARCH 16, 2025

This means having the right technology team in place, setting up ample customer support options, and ensuring that your team is available and trained to address software challenges when they occur. Bad software user experience User experience is everything when it comes to SaaS platforms. This helps alleviate confusion.

Payment Solutions 88

Payment Solutions Software Review Churn SaaS Payments 88

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 15, 2022

Product teams often fall into the trap of spending most of their time on the core functionality of the products they’re building. Without an accessible onboarding process , customers may never reach the stage where they can use the game-changing features your team has worked so hard to build, making outcomes difficult to achieve.

Onboarding 194

Onboarding Underperforming Technical Team Software Review Technical Review 194

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

Scott’s newsletter makes a great point: as buying teams get bigger and bigger, our sales teams need to grow with them. In other words, the partners balance out each other’s strengths and weaknesses. First, identify your team member’s strengths and weaknesses. Business case development and IT/tech strategy.

Underperforming Technical Team 131

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 131

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 25, 2024

There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. What about team leads? When do I split my one team into two teams? How do I split one team into two? French engineer Max Ringelmann discovered social loafing in 1913, by asking a number of people to tug on a rope.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 4, 2024

They built one platform that does it all, but also made it simple so that these small businesses they wanted to serve, could actually use it to grow revenue without needing a developer that they didn’t have. That was how much push we got after what seemed like a huge amount of engineering effort at the time.” Why is that?”

Revenue 307

Revenue Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring 307

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2019

The fastest growing software companies in recent years all have something in common – they started with little to no sales team. They relied on a great product, with a passionate userbase that helped kickstart an organic growth engine which sold the product for them. Yes, Slack started off with no sales team.

Scale 162

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Payment Services 162

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

the reason being is YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. So assuming somebody’s sort of got their business in a place, they’ve got realistic expectations, they have some growth going on or at least flat line performance that they’re not in this kind of bad situation of being in decline and then deciding.

Scale 120

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 120

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2022

Have you ever had a sudden realization that you’re spending more on sales and marketing than research and development? When it comes to marketing, executives can grow frustrated or intimidated by the sheer volume of numbers and metrics, ill-defined terminology, unclear processes, and potential conflict between sales and marketing teams.

Sales Hiring 261

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 261

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 14, 2019

Classic agencies don’t value the software enough to engender pricing power, develop fast sales cycles, or change the operations of their business to maximize the value of the ML innovation. Consequently, product market fit is weak. Rather, they masquerade as an agency with a completely different engine, one powered by algorithms.

AI 203

AI Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team Machine Learning 203