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 […]
Management is about the rigor and discipline of sticking to the important habits. One of the most important of those is always providing feedback through regular and routine 1-on-1s. It doesn’t matter how busy you think you are, how small your team is, how much you work together daily. What matters is that you schedule […]
When leading an organization, it is too easy to lose sight of what it is exactly that you yourself are supposed to be doing. While there’s no one single right answer, it is something that requires thought and determination. It is very easy to answer the generic purpose of the company, e.g. “we make widgets.” […]
I hope that the importance of having regular 1-on-1s with your direct subordinates is clear without going further into it here. Yet even when I see organizations that do these regularly, a minority has an ongoing practice of doing it with “skips,” meaning that you have these meetings with people in all levels in the […]
A frequent occurrence is promoting a team member to manage their team. When you promote these new managers you surely want to do all in your power to help them become successful in their new roles. You may reason that managing a team they know well is providing them with an advantage and setting them […]
I’ve been talking to my clients about the balance required in a successful and effective team, which lies on 3 factors: Slack, Autonomy and Execution. Recently I’ve seen several examples of Autonomy issues that could have caused a lot of failure work. Picture this: You as an executive or director delegate a new project to […]
A major part of leading a big tech organization is making sure that the team doesn’t get bogged down by constantly having to reinvent the wheel, especially internally. Greatness, and simply sticking to your deadlines, comes from standing on the shoulders of giants and those in your team that have already made the needed decisions. […]
A common issue I hear being raised by clients and peers, is the constant need to reinvent yourself as a tech executive in a growing company. There are different kinds of CTOs or tech VPs (more on that in a different time), but no matter which one you are, you cannot keep doing the same […]