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 Merchant Services DevOps as a Service 214

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.

MAY 29, 2018

Those unfamiliar with what product engineers do could be forgiven for assuming that it’s all broadly the same job. The shift from one type of job to another has highlighted for me the stark differences between different engineering disciplines. Being a Consultant Engineer.

Consulting 169

Consulting Engineering Outsourced Development Underperforming Technical Team 169

Andreessen Horowitz

DECEMBER 4, 2023

Most growth-stage CEOs I work with know how to tell if they’re efficiently allocating capital in every part of their budget with one glaring exception: research and development (R&D). Focus on performance management of your product and engineering teams as early indicators for what R&D investments are working, and which aren’t.

Underperforming Technical Team 125

Underperforming Technical Team Benchmarks CTO Hire New CTO 125

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 121

Underperforming Technical Team CTO Hire CTO Coach Technical Review 121

Intercom, Inc.

AUGUST 15, 2018

On day one as Reddit’s new VP of Engineering, Nick Caldwell faced a dilemma. He had just spent 13 years at Microsoft, most recently as the head of 300 engineers. At Reddit, he led a team of 35 – none of whom knew how to manage other engineers. Managers oversee their team members’ work and career development.

Leadership 141

Leadership Engineering Part-Time VPE CTO Coach 141

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 121

Technical Review Development Team Review Systems Review Engineering 121

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

More business people than engineers. Learn about your investors previous bad investments (this could determine your fate!). #2 Causes: Weak previous relationship. 5 Slow product development. Engineers aren’t involved in park decisions. Bad co-founder relationships. Discouraged or disengaged engineering team.

Underperforming Technical Team 171

Underperforming Technical Team Startup Engineering Retention 171

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.

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

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 211

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE Scale Underperforming Technical Team 211

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 19, 2018

As up and coming engineers in Silicon Valley, Jean Hsu and Edmond Lau long sought more influence and impact in their respective positions – but they couldn’t shake the feeling of being stuck. Many engineers feel like they must make a jump into management to lead. Jean: Especially with engineering teams.

Engineering 135

Engineering Leadership Software Review Technical Review 135

OnStartups

MAY 18, 2021

All the points below have been pulled from startup sales teams that I think work pretty well (including the team at CRM software company, HubSpot). Building Startup Sales Teams. You're an engineer/designer/whatever. Don’t think VP of Sales — think “Revenue Engineer”. Don’t hire sales people too early.

Sales Hiring 110

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Startup 110

BetterCloud

APRIL 8, 2024

Fostering customer relationships through innovation Over the course of 2 exhilarating days, our team of engineers, product managers, and designers collaborated closely with our customers. Customer driven development is one of the most effective ways to get it closest to right the first time around. The result?

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Innovation Development Engineering 52

User Pilot

APRIL 6, 2023

Developing and releasing sophisticated products with all the bells and whistles imaginable might seem like a great idea. TL;DR An over-engineered product is more complex than it should be and it solves problems that don’t exist. Low feature adoption is one of the symptoms of over-engineering. Book the demo!

Underperforming Technical Team 100

Underperforming Technical Team Management Interviewing Scale 100

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 177

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Leadership 177

User Pilot

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

A market gap can be caused by missing functionality or poor user experience. Tracking user behavior in-app enables product teams to find ways to improve product experience. Competitor analysis enables PMs to find areas where rivals fail customers and develop sound positioning and differentiation strategies.

Underperforming Technical Team 101

Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research Outsourced Development 101

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 16, 2018

They help managers evaluate how their employees are doing, the value they bring to a team and how their work can be improved. Now, as one of the managers of a global support team that is quickly scaling, I can completely understand not only the necessity but the benefits of tracking KPIs. But KPIs carry the risk of seeming impersonal.

Customer Support 154

Customer Support Underperforming Technical Team Scale Construction 154

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 217

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 217

Casey Accidental

FEBRUARY 26, 2024

This can make it tricky to evaluate as an engineer, designer, product manager or CEO if the investment will bear fruit and whether one should keep going. I’ll explain how I think about these decisions as a product leader and give more context on the journey of developing entirely new products inside a company.

Underperforming Technical Team 63

Underperforming Technical Team Scale GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Startup 63

Audacix

MAY 11, 2023

A vulnerability assessment tools or virtual app scanning for your software team has become as important as your git repository or your ticket management system. You might end up building a whole team in-house to support the open source tool of your choice, which, one would think, defeats the purpose of going open source in the first place?

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Software Cloud Software Engineering 52

User Pilot

AUGUST 21, 2023

Product managers often work in cross-functional teams and bridge the gap between multiple departments. Product managers need to put themselves in the shoes of company executives, other team members, and of course end users so a strong affinity for empathy will go a long way. What qualities do you look for in a strong product team?

Interviewing 93

Interviewing Underperforming Technical Team Management Sales Hiring 93

ChurnZero

MARCH 15, 2019

Churn Monster #10: Bad Fit Customer . We’re talking about a bad fit customer. A bad fit customer is a customer who is unable to receive value from your product or service due to a mismatch of currents needs and offerings. You are worried you have acquired a bad fit customer. What do you do?

Underperforming Technical Team 45

Underperforming Technical Team Churn Software Review Compensation 45

Andreessen Horowitz

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

We pulled from my prior marketplaces experience and dove into their business quickly to develop a point-of-view on the opportunity. Prior to founding Instacart, Apoorva was a fulfillment optimization software engineer from Amazon. It truly has been a team effort. It was April 2014, and the company was raising its Series B.

Marketplace as a Service 142

Marketplace as a Service Scale Underperforming Technical Team Construction 142

Kellblog

NOVEMBER 2, 2023

As we struggle to hit top-down targets through rounds of cost-cutting, we cut here and squeeze there so much that we can develop a certain myopia. Or product relative to engineering? And create perverse incentives to not terminate weak employees in the process. Why do we forget this? More simply, do we still have travel budget?

VP of Engineering 108

VP of Engineering Travel Underperforming Technical Team Headcount 108

Point Nine Land

OCTOBER 23, 2023

We recently hosted the Point Nine Founders Summit, featuring several panels and presentations from founders, CFOs, COOs, and sales execs on building early sales teams and hiring your first successful sales leaders. It helps keep the product team focused on customer feedback and providing value in exchange for revenue.

Sales Hiring 125

Sales Hiring Scale Technical Advisors Technical Cofounder 125

User Pilot

JULY 27, 2023

Engineering Manager: In charge of planning, designing, and overseeing projects. They also manage finances and supervise one or more engineering teams. What to do before building a team for your SaaS company You can’t just jump into hiring without some forethought, or you’ll make many mistakes. Average salary: $192,383/yr.

Sales Hiring 98

Sales Hiring SaaS Payments Sales Recruiting CTO Hire 98

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

At the Product-Led Institute, we developed the “Triple-A” sprint, which focuses on rapidly identifying problems, building solutions, and measuring impact. The Triple-A sprint gives you a way to build a sustainable growth process and can be used by any team in your business. Ask yourself: Which part of your business is underperforming?

Underperforming Technical Team 69

Underperforming Technical Team Development Churn Metrics 69

Frontegg

FEBRUARY 10, 2022

For example, app developers can implement a hybrid authentication setup in tandem with Social Logins if needed. Weak or reused passwords are often the culprit. No matter how well educated the end-user is, human nature always leads to poor security hygiene and compromised security standards. Less Stress on IT and Support Teams.

Underperforming Technical Team 105

Underperforming Technical Team Scale B2B Innovation 105

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 207

Scale Sales Hiring Cybersecurity Underperforming Technical Team 207

Kellblog

OCTOBER 21, 2021

Today, I call them “pipeline sources” but I’ve also heard them referred to as “pipegen sources” (as in pipeline generation) and even “revenue engines” which I think is an over-reach, if not a well intentioned one [2]. The over-reach is they’re not really engines, more fuel sources.

Underperforming Technical Team 131

Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Advertising Forecasting 131

OpenView Labs

MAY 19, 2021

Though her early education didn’t include programming, she dabbled in HTML as a kid and wound up graduating with a degree in biomedical engineering. After college, Ashley joined Twilio and played a key role in helping the company reach, engage, and convert its developer audience. Core values: Getting it right with developers.

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Development Technical Review Marketing 52

User Pilot

JANUARY 8, 2024

As you read on, you will learn: The power of search engines, content marketing, and existing user testimonials and how to leverage them to win new users. Leverage search engine optimization (SEO) in your marketing strategy Identify relevant keywords related to your product or service and optimize your website content accordingly.

Acquisition 105

Acquisition Strategy Social Media Underperforming Technical Team 105

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 220

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Marketing Market Research 220

Intercom, Inc.

JULY 17, 2021

Meet Serena Fritsch, Product Engineer at our Dublin office. Serena joined us six years ago and has become an integral part of the engineering team. We chatted to her about why she chose Intercom, her dreams, and her advice for women looking to get into engineering. Did you know you always wanted to be an engineer?

Underperforming Technical Team 129

Underperforming Technical Team Engineering Interviewing Technology 129

Point Nine Land

MARCH 15, 2022

If you take a look at a 50 person sales team, you’ll likely find it to be very data-driven. They usually track low-level metrics about their app performance or errors, and agile teams have burn-down charts. Previous attempts failed or didn’t get a lot of adoption, usually because of some combination of these issues: Poor data quality.

Investment 52

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 52

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 7, 2019

At the Product-Led Institute, we developed the “Triple-A” sprint, which focuses on rapidly identifying problems, building solutions, and measuring impact. The Triple-A sprint gives you a way to build a sustainable growth process and can be used by any team in your business. Ask yourself: Which part of your business is underperforming?

Underperforming Technical Team 52

Underperforming Technical Team Development Churn Metrics 52