For the last couple weeks I've been on an "Management Sabbatical" – a term I dubbed for where I'm working full-time, but on none of my typical leadership/management type work.
Instead, I'm getting to just explore ideas and reconnect with some IC work. Almost no calls/meetings, just Maker Time – for nearly the whole summer. Couldn't be more excited about it!
I decided to do this since the timing seemed perfect:
- We split our big Product/Eng team into 6 smaller teams at EOY (I'll write more about this re-org later), and those teams are now fully up-and-running
- We recently got back from our Paris all-company retreat where the whole company got increased clarity/alignment around product vision & roadmap
- Some key leadership hires on my team were hired and fully onboarding recently, and doing great.
- With AI, there's never been a more exciting time to just build!
What exactly am I up to?
- Deeper exploration of AI Coding Agents
- Getting re-acquainted with some more modern coding practices and actually shipping code on @Close again
- Exploring other creative ideas that may be impactful to the business
- Whatever else seems interesting :)
I expect this time of being less-busy will be refreshing, give me better perspective, and ultimately help me come back as a better Leader.
Very grateful for the full support from @Steli & @anemitz and other EPD leadership coworkers to give me space to do this!
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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:
github.com/philfreo/password-enabler-extension
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.