Startup CEOs face a very tricky transition period when their software engineering teams are between 10 and 30 people. …

It’s depressing how many companies accuse their product and engineering teams of being a black box. The accusations aren’t always fair, but they usually stem from two root problems: 1. not enough collaboration, and 2. not enough externalization. Here’s how we are tackling those two things at our company. Collaboration: We…

When I first joined Axial, the product and engineering side of things was pretty broken, and there was a serious absence of trust. The team didn’t trust leadership, and leadership didn’t trust the team. The rest of the business — actually, even worse, customers — didn’t trust product/engineering. The culprits…

Some of the most interesting questions posed to me lately have come from job applicants. A recent applicant asked me (paraphrased): “is it fair to say that PMs are responsible for discovering and validating the customer’s problem, whereas design is responsible for discovering and validating the customer’s solution?” I see…

This morning I received an email from an interesting job candidate. He asked me four good questions and I thought I would answer in the open. What attracts you to Axial? How do you encourage growth on the team? How do you handle bad morale? What are your strengths and…

Last week I had breakfast with a founder-CEO who had been through the wringer. After spending years building a successful services business, she got squeezed out and screwed by an unscrupulous business partner. Not one to stay down, she picked herself up and started a new firm, only to be…

The product and engineering team at Axial has undergone a lot of change in the last year or so. We survived a major (and fraught) re-architecture effort, we rebuilt the core recommendation/matching engine at the heart of the product, we’ve gone from shipping code every few months to shipping almost…

For the last several years, I’ve been very focused on how to get the most out of product and entrepreneurial teams. Three little words keep on coming back to me. They bite you when you forget them, and pay dividends when you pay them respect. Write it down. Doesn’t seem…

An old colleague of mine, Anil Podduturi, used to exhort everyone that worked for him to “control your narrative.” My interpretation of his saying is that we all need to get pro-active about how we are perceived. The hard truth is that people make judgements. They will make judgements about…