We recently formalized our engineering principles. Principles are important to guide and make people find out the best decisions, especially when faced to different situations. However, it is a waste of time for routines and common sense. That is why we also need practices to accelerate the process of making decisions. But not having principles and […]

The pain will always exist. No matter the size of your company. No matter how experienced you became. No matter how the context changed for the better. It does not matter at all. It is the same for high-performance athletes: it will never become easy or painless, they actually train and change to support it. After […]

There are a lot of thoughts and a battle of ego when passing the sticks. Don’t be afraid of it. Your legacy will be there. If you are a founder, people will know how you started the company. If you were an early employee, people will know how important you were to move the business. Whatever your merit […]

At some point of the journey, you should pass the sticks. Building a company is a marathon. You can’t run a couple of triathlons in a sequence. It is the same that you won’t be able to teach your kid everything she needs to know for the whole life, she will need to learn from […]

If you are a manager and still dictates what to do next in a specific discipline, you haven’t solved the real problem. You shouldn’t be leading it. Your main skill should be hiring someone that is better than you to solve the problem. Dictating won’t scale for long. You will automatically notice that you really […]

There are two categories of great individual contributors: the ones with great technical skills and also maturity, and the others without maturity. The first rule is that you should never bring people without a great technical background or adequate for their level, so let’s focus on people with that – right side of the chart. The […]

Every day is a different day in a startup. There are good days and positive signals that make everybody get happy however there are bad days when you have to deal with loses and incidents for example. Sometimes this also changes during the period, there is no rule. No matter what happens, you have to control your […]

Everything breaks during scale phase. Your software will break. Also your processes, individuals, leaders, data, office, and structure. Even your wi-fi will break. Every time you decide for something think how would feel to add 10x in it. This could help you in extending the breaking lifetime of your decisions. Understand that everything breaks and choose […]

We are always in a rush. And we are always looking ways to be more productive, and also to do productive meetings. For instance, send me the items earlier, a 30min slot at the max, try to solve it async, rigid agenda, etc. I do that a lot. However, sometimes to achieve the best result you […]

I usually receive questions regarding the role of CTO and VP of Engineering. There is a couple of great blog posts on this topic such as Suster’s and Dickert’s one. Forget about the roles. Both functions are important. In the early days, you will have to define the technical direction – and code a lot! After the […]