Posted on 22/1/2019, 10:08 pm, by Colin Charles, under
Business.
“In the end we couldn’t find a tech team we could trust and that could produce what we asked of them.”
How these words ring so true. This is from a Medium post by John Biggs, now working at The Block.
It is amazing to see what happened, as they hired two tech teams:
“Our first tech team worked mightily on product that worked but was not scalable. Our second tech team was self-interested and the tech did not work.”
They raised $150k, had 10 employees, two development teams, and over 8,000 beta users, but were unable to deliver functioning technology.
I have no idea if these were outsourced teams, or hired teams (I’ll go with outsourced), but this is a real problem facing many companies, not just those involved in the cryptocurrency space. Sometimes it also has to do with the irrational exuberance of the leadership team, directing the tech teams. This is where experience makes sense and pays off…
It makes me think a lot about the offering of the fractional CTO (basically a fractional CxO in general). There is a lot to do. A lot of patterns to recognise. A lot of project management. And a lot of understanding on what can and should be delivered in an appropriate timeframe. Something a really technical co-founder or lead will get right, but something the average founder will miss.
Posted on 3/6/2016, 3:16 pm, by Colin Charles, under
Business.
Via The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak.
I get about 400 to 500 e-mails a day, and I probably send about 120. At any given moment, I’ll have only 10 items in my inbox. When an e-mail comes in, I read it and decide immediately: Delete, reply, or delegate?
Customer emails? Let everyone see them. Because when an engineer sees the same query coming in a few times, they’ll stop and fix the code. This makes a lot of sense – which is why in traditional organisations, the support organisation needs to be tightly coupled to the engineering organisation. I’ll throw in the sales engineering organisation to this too.
Diversity of success, style, thinking and language – hire for that.
A lot of companies have the “no assholes” rule. So if the greatest programmer ever is also a jerk, he’s fired. Our rule is “no neutrals.” So when the new guy walks down the hall, is my team drawn to him? Or do they divert their glance? If they divert their glance, we fire that person. I call it the hallway test, but it’s more of a conceptual thing. The idea is when you put superstars together, you can ask, “What did you do today that excited the people around you and made them better at their jobs?” If you can’t give examples, I don’t want you here.
Favourite metric? Revenue per employee.
