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Hiring engineers has always been hard. For a while, as a remote first company, it was actually amazing. The world was available to you. Talented individuals were everywhere. Today everyone is fake, like live-face-swapping fake. Over half the candidates are fake in some way. I’ve pretty much given up and have fallen back to referrals only. This is me venting about the the top 5 fake candidate…
I grew up with PowerPoint. I started in the world of software and technology, specifically software for Enterprise, back in 1999. In this world, you had to have MS Office. I was immediately drawn to PowerPoint. There was a time where PowerPoint was fine. It was only special events or milestone meetings that would require a slide deck, and wheeling out the 50lb projector. As my career evolved,…
If you’re an up and coming product manager, you probably have had discussions about the definition of done; one of the more useful concepts coming out of agile methodologies. It’s nothing fancy. It’s really just a checklist of items that are agreed upon by the product and engineering teams (as well as other departments like sales, marketing, devops) that must be complete before you can consider…
In 2022 it’s quite rare to find someone who’s leading the same product for more than a couple years. It’s even more rare to have been around from product genesis to maturity. I’m rare I guess. I rode the wave of a single idea for over a decade. This turned into dozens of products, an ever expanding code base, a myriad of personas, multiple vertical markets and sub verticals, and thousands of…
This is a hard one to write about. Last year our team lost Pete, a long time engineer. Pete took his own life. He had battled mental health issues for some time. Our team was tight, fully remote for a decade, and Pete was part of it for 7 years. In the software engineering world, 7 years at the same job is a lifetime. The thing was, we’d never met Pete. Only a few of us had actually met in person.…
I think it was due to overwhelming boredom with the RFP process that I once partnered with my sales leader to say Yes to every single requirement on every RFP bid during the summer of 2020. We called it The Summer of Yes . It didn’t matter . Our win rate didn’t change. Here’s a few things I’ve learned about RFPs over the years. A common sales process in B2B enterprise looks like this: I know this…
For a project I was working on, some of the research involved listening to thousands of sales calls from well known high-growth B2B SaaS companies. Being a product manager, I’d been involved in many sales calls before that involved *my* product. But when it’s not your product being pitched, demoed and sold, it’s way more enlightening. The products in question ranged from dev tools, to RevOps, to…
I’m 15-20 years older than most of my colleagues. I’ve done a couple startup things in previous eras, but not a modern venture backed startup. I knew mostly what I was getting into as I was actively seeking it out. There’s no critique here, these are just a collection of findings from my first few months that many old and young will relate to. Mental health is a major concern in the tech scene and…
Getting a screenshot when triaging a support ticket can be the difference between reaching a resolution in 5 minutes, versus 5 months, or even never. In my earliest days in the software business I wore a lot of hats, and one of them was support. I fully understood the condition of a user and how frustrating lengthy support ticket lifecycles could be. As I moved into the product management space…