Management Sabbatical: Maker Time
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!
Paris Retreat
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.
Cold Sales
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.
Async Weeks
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.
Product Engineers
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.
TreasuryDirect password field
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.
LEGO Boost
Got my 5yo LEGO Boost for Christmas – really impressed, fun way to get kids into programming/robotics.
@LEGO_Group twitter.com/i/web/status/1611160877977190407
