Perhaps you’ve heard the term “founder attention” or “founder focus” thrown around. Maybe you’re even using it yourself. However, this is often a short-term thing that misses out on longer-term gains. Let’s debug it. First, with a definition: Founder Focus (noun): The deliberate and strategic emphasis placed by a company’s founder(s) on certain areas or […]
If you’ve been paying attention, I’ve been writing about profitable product-engineering teams recently. As part of that, some people reached out to me to talk about FinOps. Ostensibly, that’s part of it, right? Well, not really. That’s because focusing on cloud optimization wins does help with the bottom line, but it’s purely cost-centered thinking. FinOps […]
Many of us in the tech industry have experienced the dread of working in environments with prolonged development cycles reminiscent of the archaic waterfall processes. The instinctual reaction is to swing the pendulum to the other extreme, advocating for the release of software as early and as frequently as possible. While this approach has its […]
In recent years, spurred by the era of zero interest rate policies (ZIRP), startups have been on a hiring spree, scaling up their teams with little regard for the impending complexities and inefficiencies. This approach has often led to bloated organizations with layered hierarchies, slowing down innovation and decision-making processes. However, as we pivot away […]
“Oh, we’re doing great on our end; tech isn’t the bottleneck for us.” Have you said anything along those lines recently? Many startup tech leaders have boasted about this situation in the past. Now, I’d hate to be a bottleneck, but truth be told, in most cases where I witnessed the described situation, things didn’t […]
🎶 You’re so vain, you probably think these metrics are about you 🎶. Having just wrapped up a series about profitable R&D organizations, I realized there’s one added aspect that we need to cover, and that’s aligning your own personal sense of progress, achievement, and impact with actual business value. To do that, let’s quickly […]
We’ve covered profitability in your tech team when it comes to the guiding principles, actual software, and your organization. This article will address a holy grail of highly impactful teams: innovation. How do you handle tech debt profitably? Why aren’t hackathons worth it? And more. Unprofitable Innovation I think it will be easier to discuss […]
For the vast majority of tech executives, profitability was an entirely foreign concept for years. Startups rarely aimed to reach that goal in general, and even more rarely was R&D viewed from that lens in startups. Continuing this theme of profitable tech teams, this article will focus on the people in your organization and what […]
My latest article about highly profitable R&D teams got a lot of attention, and thus, we’re continuing with that subject. We’ll start and cover first aid: how can you quickly stop the bleeding in your already unprofitable software? Unprofitable Software? First, I feel this is something we have to tackle. I still come across startup […]
Up until a year or so ago, less than 5% of startups would even consider the concept of engineering being a profitable and healthy organization. ZIRP and the financial climate meant that wasn’t really a consideration. You could continue piling up more and more coders. As the industry is going through a healthy correction, you […]