DeepCrawl: Creating a Culture of Autonomy and Accountability to Succeed
In the latest in our series of interviews with CEOs and founders backed by Beringea, we look at how DeepCrawl has adapted to succeed during the pandemic
Adapting to the management techniques and working practices requires to operate during a global pandemic has been a significant challenge for companies worldwide. It is a challenge that has been particularly acutely felt within early-stage companies.
Many tight-knit teams that had previously thrived on the close communication and collaboration of an office environment were forced to embrace remote working. Michal Magdziarz is founder and CEO of DeepCrawl, the rapidly growing SaaS platform for analyzing and improving technical SEO, and he has strived to adapt the culture and processes within DeepCrawl to succeed during the pandemic.
As Michal commented: “The DeepCrawl culture was always based upon personal interactions; we would learn a lot by receiving feedback from different people across different departments. It is hard to replicate this remotely and there was a risk that there was disconnect between teams.” As a result, Michal and the team have adapted and learned valuable lessons about scale-up management.
Leading in a pandemic: micro-management will create headaches
Michal quickly identified the barriers to successful management during widespread lockdowns facing the DeepCrawl offices in Europe and the U.S. “It was quite apparent during the pandemic that teams that had traditionally been micro-managed would struggle,” he said. “Whereas any areas of the business where people had greater freedom to succeed and develop would flourish.”
This experience provided Michal and his leadership team with a clarity of focus upon the type of culture and structure that they wanted to foster within DeepCrawl. “The pandemic confirmed that creating autonomous teams and providing people with accountability, offering them the freedom to shine, and enabling them to develop individual functions is the correct approach,” Michal said.
Michal is, therefore, acutely focused on shaping DeepCrawl around this organisational framework over the coming year: “We want to give more autonomy, break the business into smaller taskforces, provide sub-teams with greater freedom and delegate more to middle management.”
Michal adds that “this means two things: one, we need to find leaders that can drive functions with experience and expertise. And two, we need to create squads throughout the businesses which can deliver on clear objectives and tasks.”
Trends of the pandemic: the dominance of online and the need for collaboration
In the early weeks of the pandemic, DeepCrawl had to grapple with a substantial product launch — Automator provides developers with the tools to analyse the impact of updates on SEO performance before they are rolled out across a website. It taps into two pivotal trends of the past six months: the dominance of online retail and interactions, and remote working.
As Michal explains: “First, online channels are more important than ever — organic channels are now the cornerstone of e-commerce and they must be managed correctly, while businesses must be able to manage SEO successfully to drive revenues. Second, the vast majority of engineering teams around the world have entered remote or hybrid working models — this requires new tools and ways of working.”
Automator harnesses both of these trends, providing businesses with a tool to proactively analyze and improve the impact of website updates on SEO. And it enables better communication between the various teams managing digital, from marketing to SEO, engineering and product development.
Michal also identifies a challenge specific to developers working remotely that Automator tackles: errors that arise from a lack of collaboration. “Talking purely about engineering teams, remote workforces are more productive than when they are in the office, but they are more likely to introduce bugs or bad code. Automator can enable higher productivity, but it ensures that you do not introduce bad code.”
Over the coming months, DeepCrawl will be focused on rolling out Automator across its customer base in Europe and North America, as well as ensuring that its entire team has the autonomy and accountability to thrive in a world of remote working.
