Just getting back to regular work this week after an incredible week outside of Paris with the @Close team, followed by some vacation fun touring around Switzerland with my wife!

Remote is great, but there's nothing like in-person time for re-energizing teams on a laser-focused vision.

We set a clarified product vision and shared roadmaps, showed did a bunch of AI demos from engineers and non-engineers alike, and just had some good valuable in-person relationship & brainstorming time.

Paris Retreat

Everyone loves to hate on cold sales calls & emails.

Normally I do too. Annoyed by volume of junk email. Annoyed by people finding my cell phone # to try to sell SaaS or recruiting services to @Close

But just now I got a cold call on my cell. Just when I was about to hang up...

I realized they were providing a solution to a problem that I have a burning need to solve right now – one of our top product priorities!

Similar happened last week – a cold email from another SaaS company that meets the same burning need.

Those two emails/calls just hit different because they offer a solution to a real, active need of mine. I couldn't help but engage! One of them looks so good it's a real consideration for us to purchase soon – I'm really happy they reached out.

People wonder why cold outbound sales works – this is why. When you can be highly targeted in your outreach + offer a great solution to problems they're likely to have... it doesn't feel like spam. It even feels helpful.

Cold Sales

Started reading through "Remote Works" – good stuff for any manager or leader in a remote team. Also was cool to get a few of my quotes in print in this one.

About to kick off an "Async Week" next week at @Close within Eng/Product/Design.

We work pretty asynchronously normally and don't have a ton of meetings, but we use Async Weeks to flex our async muscles further with 0 prescheduled meetings during the week.

The idea is to encourage deep work and be extra thoughtful about our communication.

After doing a couple test runs, the team overwhelmingly agreed we should do these Async Weeks regularly. We follow a Shape Up inspired product development process with 6-week Cycles and 2 week cool downs, so we're doing Async once every couple months.

Managers are also encouraged to have an async (written or @Loom) 1:1s during that week, which has been a nice forcing function to encourage questions/answers that may require  reflection vs. an off-the-cuff answer.

Some good questions (that I stole)

Biggest hesitation heard was "we already don't have many meetings". Also very common for new hires to tell us we work much more async than their previous companies. I think these are good things!

As our team grows (EPD now at 35) we'll continue to experiment with how to work.

What would you get done if your calendar looked like this?

Async Weeks

Good thread on Product Engineers.

Over time I’ve learned engineers can be motivated by different things:
- Hard problems
- Performance/scalability
- Elegant code or system design
- Deeply understanding their craft

All are valuable but very different than Product Engineers. https://twitter.com/philfreo/status/1631700836609818635

When a startup is tiny they need everyone to wear multiple hats and the “product engineer” role is most crucial IMO.

Over time specialization is necessary and the hard/important thing is good collaboration cross-functionally.

But still, working with engineers that are especially laser focused on delivering user-facing product / customer value is special.

Original thread: https://twitter.com/_swanson/status/1631691930345037824

Why is it hard to have/hire true Product Engineers past the early startup phase? One big reason is that technical complexity, design quality, and also "risk of shipping the wrong thing" all increase as a company grows.

Even just taking technical complexity, the larger the company, the less likely any one engineer will be capable of creating an entire user-facing feature independently in high-quality way.

Product Engineers

In case I'm not the only person for whom TreasuryDirect's login form virtual keyboard is infuriating... 

I wrote a little browser extension to make the password field editable:
https://github.com/philfreo/password-enabler-extension 

It's not published in any browser extension stores yet (let me know if you care!) but it can be downloaded &amp; used in dev mode...

TreasuryDirect password field

Simplest way to have good SaaS technical support is to not ask a customer for any additional info without trying to reproduce the problem or get that info yourself first.

Got my 5yo LEGO Boost for Christmas – really impressed, fun way to get kids into programming/robotics.

@LEGO_Group https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1611160877977190407 

iPad app is high quality – simple enough 5yo can do it with very little help (but it’s fun to do with him). We’ve only built 1 of 5 programmable robots so far, definitely a high value of fun/learning for one kit. 

https://amzn.to/3iaZgKM

LEGO Boost

Might be going overboard organizing my kids LEGO… 

Labels/PDF: https://brickarchitect.com/labels/#download_lego_brick_labels

Drawers: https://amzn.to/3vg3UK6

LEGO Organization

Recently at @Close, we had been going in circles for several weeks on a tough Product/Engineering problem. After weeks of Zoom calls and async docs, it felt like we were going nowhere.

We tried something different...

I flew 5 coworkers to join me in St. Augustine, FL and we spent 2 days together in-person on a "mini-retreat".

We figured out something in 2 days that we hadn't in 6 weeks of zooms & async docs before that.

We came into the meetup with everyone having different ideas/opinion/perspectives – all valid and not easy to reconcile.

We left with what I believe was not only a great plan, but more importantly – clear alignment on a shared vision that will shape Close for years to come.

Why I think this worked so well:

1. Forced exclusive focus on one problem.
Especially in Eng Management / Design / PM roles, it's easy to have a lot of content switching. A meetup forced us to clear our calendars to exclusively focus on one problem for 3 days.

2. Communication bandwidth is higher in-person.
Each hour meeting is more productive in-person. I don't like that this is true, but it just is.

3. Nonstop conversations.
In one day, we talked about the problem (in a conference room + outside at lunch) for 9 hours straight. You can't book two 4-hour Zoom calls in 1 day. People would go crazy!

Plus, more sporadic conversations at the Airbnb, a bar, Uber rides, meals etc.

Finally, like any in-person retreat, it's always nice to just see people face-to-face and have a little fun together. We walked around historic St. Augustine, did a tour of a distillery, checked out some great restaurants/bars, and played some shuffle board / darts together.

Logistics for planning a low-headache meetup:
– Picked an area I already knew well & preplanned some meals
– Booked a large enough @airbnb in a nice walkable spot
– Gave everyone @ramp cards to book their own flights
– Booked a @Hilton conference room for a productive work area