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. I feel like the core team is generally a bunch of natural athletes. Is it a time?

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Development Team Review CTO Hire 265

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2025

“Even with a bad hand, if the potential reward is great enough, taking a risk can make mathematical sense.” As second-time founders, Atiyah and his team raised an outsized seed round for Ramp, giving them the capital to tackle a space that most startups couldn’t touch. But this challenge also presents opportunity.

CTO Hire 208

CTO Hire CTO Coach Scale CTO 208

SaaStr

AUGUST 31, 2022

Scalability is about capability, so businesses need to understand whether they have the capacity to grow and whether their infrastructure and team can accommodate growth. Once you have solidified your company’s vision and have developed a strategic plan on how you will achieve success, don’t get too comfortable. Creating a category.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Company Culture 246

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

Companies typically manage this through disconnected systemsan HRIS here, a payroll system there, separate systems for pensions, hours tracking, annual leave, and banking. IT Cloud : Setting up employees in apps, device management, and IT systems. His rationale: Training capacity : Sales teams can only absorb so much product knowledge.

Startup 163

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 163

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 13, 2020

ML products also require us to manage relatively large technology risks – this is an area where, unlike in most other product development, technical limitations might render the entire design impossible. Resolution Bot is a product that automatically answers the repetitive questions faced by customer support teams.

Artificial Intelligence 281

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Underperforming Technical Team Development 281

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

Incredo

MARCH 20, 2020

The Incredo team switched to a fully remote working system in September 2019. At the beginning it was a bit hard to track the progress of tasks and communicate with team members effectively. Since you started working from home, your whole team already saves around 1 hour of their day.

Underperforming Technical Team 227

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Systems Review Software Review 227

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 203

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team 203

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

MARCH 20, 2021

Account management? Don’t skip too many steps of development. But when I see folks skip 2+ stages of development, I’ve almost never seen that work out. A great boss will find ways to backfill your weaknesses, get you trained one way or another, get you into the right role with the right leads. And vice-versa. This is #1.

Sales Hiring 346

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Branding Pricing 346

SaaStr

OCTOBER 24, 2022

Developers act, think, and behave differently than your average customer. As an API-first company, WorkOS focuses on selling primarily to developers. Doing Business with Developers. Developers haven’t typically been the buyers in enterprise software, so why should you build for developers?

Underperforming Technical Team 215

Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development Development Part-Time VPE 215

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

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

SaaStr

APRIL 4, 2025

Companies can meet stringent quality requirements at a fraction of the cost of in-house teams, while accelerating their AI initiatives. Why It Matters : Customer support teams are drowning in tickets, with resolution times getting longer, not shorter. The team comes from MongoDB and Elastic, bringing deep search expertise.

AI Search 176

AI Search AI Startup Scale 176

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

There’s a CEO at the top in red, VPs in orange, senior contributors in dark gray, team leads in green, and junior individual contributors in light gray. Sometimes there are directors running teams that should be headed by VPs. Is this so bad? Hiring a large team is necessary, but insufficient. That won’t work.

Startup 312

Startup Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling 312

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 1, 2021

Most support teams have seen an influx of support queries since COVID-19 hit – and those issues are more complex than ever. According to recent research, however, many teams aren’t sufficiently equipped to meet these new challenges. Challenge #1: Limited team bandwidth, resources, and budget.

Underperforming Technical Team 232

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Scale Headcount 232

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2023

Management teams must determine how to thrive in a downturn to position their businesses for profitable growth. They also shared what strategic and holistic actions companies should take to optimize their organization and manage costs. However, management teams that pursued growth at all costs were punished severely.

Consulting 49

Consulting Underperforming Technical Team Management Marketing 49

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

sales team. We had custom CRM apps for the Weight Watchers group, scheduling systems for optical chains, inventory management for car dealers. We ended up creating a healthcare app that connected all the substance abuse manage care agencies with their providers, and their payers, and the state system. FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW.

Scale 290

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales 290

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

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2023

Or other so-called “passive” income streams that really often take many hours to manage. If a VP of Sales has a $500k+ OTE and a big team to manage, does it even make senses to sell courses on the side? I don’t wish to see more people in increasingly bad financial standing this year.

Underperforming Technical Team 325

Underperforming Technical Team Scale Sales Hiring Startup 325

User Pilot

OCTOBER 31, 2024

A product analytics strategy is essential for any business looking to make informed decisions about product development and user experience. Plus, there are many reasons why you need a product analytics strategy: Aligns product development with user needs and business goals. Lack of team resources. Outdated technology.

Strategy 105

Strategy Underperforming Technical Team Government Customer Lifetime Value 105

SaaStr

MARCH 30, 2024

Then, you’ll have enough folks and experience to put a small team on a new initiative / segment / market. Micromanaging Your First (and Second) Management Team. But there’s a reason you hired managers. Bad operational model / misunderstanding the burn rate. Leave the pipedreams for $100m in ARR.

Scaling 307

Scaling Revenue Underperforming Technical Team Market Segmentation 307

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

As companies begin to succeed, they sometimes develop a tunnel vision towards the customers who have brought them their success. If you don’t work to keep your knowledge of the market fresh and current, you may be left with a narrow view that will inevitably catch your sales and product teams flat-footed. Verify product-user fit.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Company Culture Customer Success Product Marketing 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Lesson 1: Everything is about your team. Every startup needs strong team dynamics to pull through tough times. It’s all about the team 99% of the time and 1% product and process. It’s about enabling the people on your team to be more productive and efficient. Lesson 6: Pivoting isn’t a bad thing.

Scale 246

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Scaling Interviewing 246

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. The critical role of product managers and ways to utilize them effectively. How many of you guys’ product rely on the highly functioning engineering team? Transcript.

Scale 322

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Engineering 322

ChurnZero

OCTOBER 25, 2024

There are so many questions to answer when considering how to scale a customer success team. How many people should one report to one manager? When is it time to add frontline managers? What about team leads? When do I split my one team into two teams? How do I split one team into two? Well…maybe.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Customer Success Scaling 52

SaaStr

JUNE 21, 2023

After three months, this talented guy came to Harbaugh with the recognition that LaunchDarkly’s customers were developers. He didn’t like to sell to developers, so he quit. because they needed to rebuild the sales team. They rebuilt the sales team and closed some big deals. A bad one can torpedo you.

Sales Recruiting 300

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Pricing 300

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. to be the sales engineer during the sales process and then stayed on with customer post sale to manage the implementation process. Should your sales engineers also implement the software?

Underperforming Technical Team 121

Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Sales Hiring Scale 121

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

User Pilot

OCTOBER 19, 2024

However, while some companies have managed to improve their customer satisfaction levels and benefit from it, many have not. Satisfaction in SaaS, therefore, isn’t simply about developing a nice product and launching it in the market. For instance, you can launch a CSAT survey after a customer interacts with your support team.

Business 111

Business Underperforming Technical Team Customer Lifetime Value Systems Review 111

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2023

The underperformers who aren’t putting in the effort get a conversation, and if things don’t change, it’s not a good fit. Jameson and Sam also recommend that across the org: sales, marketing and CS — the early and sooner you can get the entire team re-focused on creating their own pipeline, the better. Guess what?

Sales Hiring 288

Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Revenue Sales 288

FastSpring

JANUARY 23, 2025

Listen for the full insights into: How Flippa.com works to connect for-sale businesses with buyers while managing the complexities of valuation and seller expectations. I mean, it’s a managed marketplace. So one of the best tactics that most people won’t do is to point out the weaknesses in the business.

Scale 121

Scale Entrepreneurship Scaling Underperforming Technical Team 121

SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2023

That doesn’t mean they are “bad” Many, in fact, will thrive as a VP or Director somewhere else. From RevOps to collateral to a manager above them to SDRs feeding them deals. Someone selling Gong today often will really struggle selling a complex developer product or nuanced pharma SaaS.

Sales Hiring 329

Sales Hiring Startup Underperforming Technical Team Branding 329

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

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

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. If you’re a senior engineer and want to further your career, what skills should you develop? Will Larson: I would love to.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 25, 2020

Do you have two sales teams? Who gets what part of the long-term development budget? And most importantly, multiple products can be very distracting at the management team level. The last thing you want the team doing is chasing a shiny penny, when what really matters is hitting the plan for the quarter.

Underperforming Technical Team 356

Underperforming Technical Team Cloud Revenue Acquisition 356