Software runs my life

Month: May 2020

Are you working for a tech company?

Computer code screen

Is the company you work for a “tech” company? What does this even mean in today’s world where almost every company would grind to a halt without its technology systems?

There appear to be short and long term answers to this question.

The short term answer is that when you’re disrupting an industry and trying to raise capital, calling yourself a tech company helps. It promises higher growth, more access to tech VC capital, higher appeal to talent and disruption through innovation. These are all critical for kickstarting your startup and so adopting a tech company mantra at a startup phase makes commercial sense.

The long term answer is more complicated. In my experience, there are a number of behaviours within a company that determine it’s true identity as a tech company:

  1. Resourcing – At Google, the sales team proudly proclaim “we keep headcount tight so that we can invest in engineering”. Everyone knows the resource priority and it is actually realised. This is not purely a political hierarchy, the non-technical teams truly believe that only technology can scale fast enough to hit the audacious growth targets. There’s no such thing as “throwing bodies” at the problem – at least in terms of full time employees. Vendor or contractor growth however is a sign of masking an emerging problem here.
  2. Growth Targets – Technology works best at scale. For example, most national retailers don’t need automated warehousing because the number of SKUs and locations is not that high. If you’re Amazon however, you absolutely need this technology automation to even have a chance of hitting your massive growth targets – it only later amortises to become a competitive advantage. Tech companies truly believe that their growth goals far outstrip any organic growth projection for the sector as a whole.
  3. Time Horizon – Tesla believe that their most valuable asset will be the self-driving data accumulated over millions of kilometres of driving. This not only takes years of operating at scale to collect, but won’t become valuable until self-driving cars are truly pervasive and actually autonomous. It’s not a priority to fix the panel gaps on a $100k+ car, this will get fixed with scale and simplification. The core strategy and focus is their long term goal that requires almost puritan belief. This approach is certainly rooted in the evangelical beliefs of those who originally settled the west coast of the US.
  4. Leadership – You can’t stay the course on these long term goals if your leader doesn’t have the engineering ability and credibility to constantly reinforce the mission. As Bond Capital put it, “successful companies are led by planners – they have short and long term (10-20+ year) visions and business plans focused on data, execution, iteration, engineering and science”. It’s not just CEOs that need engineering ability, but also the board and investors are required to be increasingly technical in order to understand and support the tech company’s long term vision.

So, do you still believe you work at a tech company?

Leading Product through COVID-19

Last week Liam invited me to participate in a webinar titled “Pivoting Product and Product teams through a Crisis”. It was a real honour to be invited, as the panel was made up of a number of great product leaders from Sydney. Mable in particular has seen some big swings in supply and demand, as well as winning a very exciting Department of Health contract.

If you’d like to view the webinar, please see this YouTube video:

Pivoting Product and Product teams through a Crisis
Pivoting Product and Product teams through a Crisis

Mastering Growth with Pirates

Mastering Growth Certificate

I recently completed the Mastering Growth online course with Harvard. As an avid listener of the Masters of Scale podcast I was aware of the content, but this course really made me take the time to reflect on the themes in the context of my role as CPTO of a startup.

The podcast episode that resonated most with me was featured in one of the lectures – Uber’s How Pirates Become The Navy. The episode is about the band of startup pirates learning the benefits and behaviours of becoming a navy. Coming from Corporate land however, I needed to do the opposite and learn when to be a pirate.

Google teaches you to plan big – if it’s not in the hundreds of millions of users or $ then it’s probably not worth doing. That implies that planning and robust debate is important, and exemplifies an engineering lead culture where scale is thought through.

When shifting to a startup, although you might get hired for scale they will give you credit for speed. The company and founders has lived through a period of survival and built a credit structure around that. If you want to earn enough credits to spend on that big scale investment, you had better show you can jump on a quick dollar today. It doesn’t really matter whether that dollar aligns with the strategy or not, what matters is that you moved quickly and you closed it. You have survival instinct.

The trick is knowing when you need to show this hustle. Anyone from corporate land can tell you that quick wins buy credits, but in corporate land there are very clearly articulated strategies and even words that will help you find wins. One example is a corporate mantra of being a “trusted advisor” – just go and get a customer testimonial that shows how they relied on your advice to make a decision. Pre-meditated decision making.

In startup land, it’s more opportunistic. You need to jump on the opportunity as soon as you see it, and then work out the messaging later. A key customer mentions a tangential opportunity? Launch an MVP and then test if there’s a market for it. Worst case the takeaway message is we moved too fast – there’s no punishment for that. Best case, you made a customer happy and a dollar. Now you can put your scale hat on, market size it, and think about whether it’s something worth planning for.

Is this a good core strategy? No, if you focused on this then your ever increasing team would be in an ever bigger state of fragmentation and disarray. As a rough rule of thumb, 20% of your effort should be launching MVPs and 80% should be landing the proven ones.

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