The homepage of Phil Freo, product engineering leader
In recent years I ve been doing less blogging here, but writing more on Twitter. When I have a bit more to say, I ve found Typefully as a really nice writing tool. They also have a Profile view that rolls up tweet threads into blog post form. My latest posts are here: https://typefully.com/philfreo Enjoy!
I took my first sabbatical this year, after Close started (generously) offering fully paid 4-week sabbaticals for all employees after 5 years. Recently I spoke with our CEO, Steli, who just came back from his own sabbatical, about how our sabbaticals went and what we learned. Our conversation was recorded for our company s internal podcast [ ]
I built a micro-SaaS as my pandemic side project: TeamHome.app – An internal company directory designed for remote teams. Try it out and let me know what you think. Read on for details some background Tweetstorm version here: Some screenshots: I built TeamHome to both: give me what I always wished existed for seeing [ ]
As an engineering team at @Close, we re trying to write more about what we are learning/doing. I recently got to dabble in a little coding project, so I wrote it up. This post originally appeared on the Close Engineering Blog here. We host our main marketing website, close.com, as a static site (in our case, generated [ ]
This is the blog post version of a talk I gave at True University in Berkley, CA in June 2018 to help early stage startups scale their engineering teams from 2 to 20. Hiring is hard. Really hard. I ve been hiring on small startup engineering teams for the past 8 years (most recently grown Close’s engineering [ ]
I did an interview for the Close.io Inside Sales Summit, a free 5-day virtual summit with perspectives from 50+ leaders on inside sales. Ryan Robinson interviewed me for an engineer s perspective on topics related to sales, including how sales teams and engineering teams can work best together. Watch the interview here: https://www.insidesalessummit.com/interviews/wednesday/phil-freo/ Overview: In…
Below is an internal team post I wrote to help us at Close.io do a better job of capturing customer s feature requests in a way that leads to better product development outcomes. I m sharing this publicly because I believe this advice can help other startups and SaaS product companies as well. When a customer request for a new feature come [ ]
A common pattern in SaaS apps is to allow a free trial period of 2 weeks or 1 month, and then to require a credit card to use it any longer. Either out of curiosity or out of a genuine need for a tool that some SaaS service is offering, I will often sign up [ ]
There are two types of people in this world: People who archive incoming emails when they are finished with them, and try to achieve inbox zero People who leave all incoming email in their inbox forever but use Mark as Unread or Star/Flag message to indicate items still requiring action If you re a Type #1 [ ]
I got interviewed for my first podcast recently. It s called HackToStart, and it s one that I ve been listening to for a while now, so I was excited to be a guest on the show. Check it out here: Hack To Start Phil Freo, Full Stack Developer, Close.io In the show we also discuss one [ ]