In viticulture it is known that even if you take the best vine from your vineyard, no matter how much awards it has already received, and put it in a vineyard someplace else, you will not get the same results. I think the clearest example is the stark difference between the wines made on the […]
Many leaders, be it CTOs, VPs, or directors, are drowning in their day-to-day work. Often, one of the reasons is that they are busy constantly providing answers and decisions to their teams. It might feel appropriate, as you are a decision maker after all, right? Yet, you should not be trigger happy with that power. […]
… is not that it is executed flawlessly every single time. Following processes religiously without the team understanding the reasoning behind them is akin to the monkeys learning to avoid a ladder without understanding why. If you don’t know why you’re doing it, how can you know when you shouldn’t? Are your teams doing daily […]
Having helped many companies with their architectural decisions, both big and small, I have in my bags a few tricks to make things go smoother and more effectively for everyone. One of the major issues is that no one team is the same. I don’t have in my bag 3 solutions that I simply hand […]
Just because you never had proper mentoring when you became a leader, doesn’t mean your team can or should do it too. It doesn’t matter if you were a genius, all self-taught quickly and efficiently, or if you had to struggle to get where you are today. Simply because something was done that way doesn’t […]
If you never invest time in improving yourself, how will your team learn it’s OK to invest in improving themselves? Remember that you are a role model, whether you want to be one or not. When your team sees you invest time in your personal and professional improvement, they learn that it is welcomed and […]
In my work I’ve come across clients that seem to have decided not to make a decision when it comes to their organizational chart and defined roles. This comes in many forms, such as the Co-CTOs, two VPs with overlapping responsibilities, the flat team with no designated leader, etc. This might have been the easier […]
When working on improving a team’s efficacy and execution, it’s often clear that the norm nowadays has become total disregard of managing schedules and decreasing interruptions to a minimum. Where a couple of years ago you could see managers and engineers say they only check their email every X hours, Slack has completely stopped that […]
Working with new executives, either in new companies or newly appointed, you can always see how easily they forget the big picture. A second before starting they had all this grand ideas, plans for improvement, clear destinations. Fast forward a week and now they’re neck deep in trying to stabilize systems, meeting prior deadlines, looking […]
Almost any successful SaaS eventually has to offer some sort of developer tools as part of its growth and integration plans. It can be as simple as a javascript tag to be included in webpages, through REST APIs to SDKs and tools to be embedded and closely integrated by clients. The tendency, especially since most […]