I know that stress management may seem like the least important thing on your list right now. But stress management is exactly what you, your family, your staff and your company need. It’s how we rally the troops, keep our relationships intact, maintain perspective, and make sound business decisions. No point for me to say […]
SaaS Culture Best Practices
Read, listen and watch SaaS culture best practices for founders and leaders of growing technology companies. Join SaaS co-founders and operators for guidance on sales, marketing, customer success, culture, and institutional readiness.
Please, No More Annual Performance Reviews!
Who hates annual employee performance reviews? Everyone, that’s who. Employees hate them, managers hate them. HR probably hates them. There are plenty of studies and articles and trends to back this up. Like this one. And this one. Publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker are spreading the word. And there’s even a […]
Is It Time to Let That Person Go?
I have had many conversations (far too many to count) with managers and leaders who are trying to decide if it’s time to let someone go. The decision to keep investing in someone to try and nurture them, and coach them up to expectations, is often a gut-wrenching roller coaster of emotions and energy. But […]
6 Lessons about Customer-First Strategy
Customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they stay loyal with companies due to the experience they receive. If you cannot keep up with their increasing demands, your customers will leave you.” – Toma Kulbytė, SuperOffice Last week, we attended a fantastic webinar hosted by Paddle which discussed the benefits of […]
Startup Life: Love it or Leave it.
Staff your startup with people who love the pace, rhythm and unpredictable nature of starting and growing a company. It’s really not for everyone. When you have people who just don’t get what it’s like to work in a startup environment, there will be a lot of complaining, a lot of bloated processes (that become […]
SaaS Feedback Lifecycle: Listen to all. Act only on consensus.
Even experienced leaders can easily forget that one voice shouldn’t drive change. I try and write from recent inspiration and this post is far from an exception. Over the last few weeks, several of the CEOs we work with have all reinforced the problem of the lone voice driving change, which is a symptom of […]
How effective are your SaaS learning loops?
Agile is great, but we need to continuously process and ingest what we learn. Here’s how. Agile management across the majority of a SaaS organization provides the framework for rapid, innovation, iteration and improvement. Ultimately, the efficiency of that improvement comes down to how well we ingest and distribute what’s being learned — our SaaS […]
The 4 P’s of SaaS: People, Product, Playbooks, and Process
When looking at a problem, I have a simple framework for evaluating what’s wrong. Is it People, Product, Playbook or Process (or some combination thereof)? When the 4 P’s are all aligned and functioning well, great performance follows. And if we aren’t hitting numbers or executing well, then something within the 4 P’s isn’t right. […]
Data-Driven SaaS Growth Relies on Meaningful, Accurate Data
If your teams don’t understand and believe in your data, they won’t leap with you. I’m a huge practitioner of data-driven SaaS management. I believe that almost everything in a SaaS business can and should be measured. But there are two important caveats to measurement that I’ve recently seen overlooked. First, the data you use […]
How Do You Know When the Talking Isn’t Walking?
Let’s get another cliché out of the way. Talk is cheap. Hmm. In SaaS that’s actually not so true. A lot of talk gets funded. And a lot of decisions get made based on plans (nice, formalized, talk). From there, a lot of evaluation is done based on reporting data (another form of talk). I […]
