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book leadership

Due Diligence for CEOs, CTOs & Engineering Managers: The main business findings that matter to your organization

It’s Here!

“How to check if what they are saying is true?”…or…”A No-Nonsense Guide to Tech Due Diligence” or some other catchy title like that.

My new book “Due Diligence for CEOs, CTOs & Engineering Managers: The main business findings that matter to your organisation (Short books for busy managers series)” is now available. 

The book costs less than a tunafish sandwich and, honestly, smells a lot better.

It explains the most important due diligence areas and findings you should know about as a business leader when identifying and quantifying the risk of partnering with a supplier or investing in a business.

It does it in terms so simple even CEOs and CTOs can understand it.

If you love me like you say you do, here’s what to do:

   1. Go here and buy the book.

   2. Write a glowing review of the book and post it on Amazon.

   3. Then, if you have a 10 minutes to kill, read it.

Categories
book leadership

The 1 Rule for CTOs & Engineering Managers: Focus on Impact

Pleased to say that our second book in a series aimed at CTOs and Engineering Managers has been published on Amazon.

This 10-minute text explains the single most important rule CTO and Engineering Manager should follow based on our experiences at Meta and other organisations.

Forget technology. Forget investors. Forget shareholders. Forget Scrum. Forget DevOps. Learn how to make impact quickly in your role as a CTO or Engineering Manager.

If you found value in this super-short read, we’d be grateful if you’d leave an honest review on Amazon. It’ll take a few seconds of your time, and your support makes a real difference. 

Categories
book leadership

Contracts for CTOs: 9 commercial contract clauses that really matter

Pleased to say that our first book in a series aimed at CTOs has been published on Amazon.

This 10-minute text points CTOs to the 9 commercial contract clauses that really matter. Forget technology. Forget sales talk. Forget the promises you’re given. Learn how to add value to your role as CTO by reducing costs and increasing profit.

Commercial contracts are where risk and reward meet, and you need to be able to navigate that intersection.

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decisions engineering principles leadership strategy team

Engineering Principles 2020

I believe that what we do matters, what your team does matter and what your business does matter. Below is a helpful list of ‘engineering’ principles to focus on creating an environment where we can do our best work and use our time to matter.

1 – Work on yourself, your relationships and your team

Learn every day. Listen every day and try to think every day. Have a plan to learn React Native, finish masters, start a PhD, write a blog. Life is not static and time is limited. Is there a better way to use it than to improve yourself and your relationships?

2 – Hire good people who like to make things

Look for track record of thoughtfulness, consideration, kindness and consciousness. Also, look for builders and makers. Those are the people you can rely on and enjoy building businesses with. So your interviews need to be behaviour-based – assess whether someone has opinions and isn’t afraid to argue around a whiteboard. Avoid extravert biases. In tech, especially avoid male-centric interviewing. The world is huge. Do you want your AI to be programmed by only people like you? I wouldn’t.

3 – Code always wins

Talk is cheap. Building is hard. Always favour building, releasing and learning. Adopt continuous release management and stick with it. Release small and frequently. If you can do this, you are doing better than 90% of other businesses out there. Make the release process… a process without ExCo sign offs, special tests, service shutdowns. Anything that is not automated will cause a problem. Why? Because people don’t like responsibility for something they don’t fully understand. So, avoid it. Automate it instead.

Realise that things fail all the time. That’s okay. We know that failures are inevitable. Instead of ruminating over them, aim to reduce the time lag in detecting the failure and passing bugs to the engineering team. Learn from the failure and move on.

Finally, decoupled your releases. It is much easier to control complexity if you incrementally change. So avoid big releases as they mostly fail as the tech in 2019 is too complex to be managed by control. Always rely on the tracking and monitoring data as it will help you once the logic has dried up.

4 – Every team is a startup with a common vision

Common vision is important across the business. But you also need flexibility and autonomy to move fast. Combining team autonomy with a shared vision will make your business more robust. Paradoxically you want to rely on all of your team but at the same time, you must ensure that the business can continue with people being 3 weeks on holiday without access to the internet. So what do you do? Build team autonomy. Operate in cross-functional, autonomous Agile squads. Always document well. Documenting (user sorties, test, tech strategy, plans, roadmaps) is the most efficient way to communicate accurately and succinctly. Remember team roadmaps are driven by company goals. All of these goals, as well as individual objectives and key results (OKRs), need to be visible to all.

Your user data is your gold mine. Every team needs to live security by design. Security is not only owned by the Cheif Security Officer or CTO. Security is also owned by every product manager, designer, engineer, tester. Everyone who worked on a feature is responsible for the security of user data. Get familiar with the OWASP best practices, and strive to have automated security scanning with every deployment.

5 – Continuously remove your own legacy

Be critical of yourself. Reflect on past decisions. Learn from them to try and make better decisions next time. This is not to say not to make decisions. Make them all the time but be aware of decisions which are hard to correct (any hiring decision, picking a back-office platform) against decisions which are easily fixable later (landing pages design, AdWords campaign). Every decision you make creates some legacy. Carve out 2 weeks every quarter to spend on your legacy decisions to stay on top of it in terms of cost implications and to ensure future fitness for purpose. Your business has evolved and what worked during the first 6 months might not work now.

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cloud decisions design hacks leadership program security startup strategy team tools

Tech Stack for Growth

So you have launched. You figured out how to make money and you are ready to grow. A good tech stack for growth businesses is depicted in the diagram. Gowing the business usually requires more people. So your tech stack will need to expand to include user management tools. My guidance here is to make sure you figured out what’s available from Gsuite or Office 365 before adding new complexity. By the way, you should only use either Gsuite or Office 365. Never both. Remember to always avoid complexity. If you like us and many other businesses, you will have Macs and Windows. You should also understand Gsuite or Office 365 offering for user kit management before adding new tools. As a growing business, you will consider adding new customer channels. We added fairly quickly telephony and webchat and also integrations to other (non-core) services. You don’t want to build any of this unless it’s your USP which is very unlikely. Finally, remember to constantly review your technology stack to continuously remove legacy.

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behaviour future leadership strategy

Beginning of year 2019 post

The holiday period is always a good time to reflect on the year gone by, and to turn our minds to the future.
 
2018

We started in March 2018 with an idea that we had for a while: making debtor experience best it can be while making the collections process as efficient as it can be. 

I won’t dwell too much on 2018, but what another fantastic year for our business! We developed the product and accompanying service and started executing go-to-market, hired the the team and secured a business incubator backing.

We also learnt a lot on the way. However the key lesson for us would be that hyperrealism is a friend.

  • Assuming the product will resonate with the market (if untested) will most likely be proven wrong. On reflection this is obvious.
  • Product-market fit takes time. Assume you are wrong, so test. Don’t pitch to customers. Proof is to have a meaningful commitment: signed order, intro to a decision maker.
  • Message-market fit will come from talking to customers.
  • Deep analytical understanding is only possible with sufficient data being available.
  • Create your data by talking to customers, partners and competitors. Don’t pitch, think of uncomfortable question to ask, listen to answers and try to disprove your own world view.
  • Once you stop hearing new info you probably know enough to develop testable product hypothesis.
  • Product team needs to lave products (not just in your own domain). Actually better to have broader product experience than domain experience.
  • New product requires new thinking applied to proven product design. No need to invent unessential elements of your product. Use best practice for sign up, activation, integrations, security.

2019

Taking leanings from 2018, we are looking at 2019 with clear focus on go-to-market, building a strong team and serving our customers.  

Categories
hacks leadership people process startup strategy

Lessons Learned Running Tech Consultancy

Needless to say that advice here is relevant in 2018 as it was in 2012:

  • Everyone starts on fulltime salary
  • Process is very important
  • Not a fan of remote working setup (I agree 100% unless it gives scale and capability hard to hire locally)
  • Business development ways:
    • Writing blog posts
    • Giving presentations to general tech audiences (more beginners than experts)
    • LinkedIn
    • Referrals
    • Being found on Google
Categories
book hacks leadership strategy

Reading: Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

Bed bound for the last 2 days and when not reviewing PRs I read Good Strategy / Bad Strategy book from 2011 FT short list, and I am starting to realise that I don’t now what our strategy is.

Could it be that I wasn’t paying attention? Or we need to work this out? I reviewed a few series A pitch decks and clearly many haven’t worked what their strategy is.

Some ideas from the book can be found on slides here.

Categories
behaviour leadership people startup team

No ego

Hiring, hiring, hiring. I’ve been hiring for the last 6 months non-stop. Before leaving my job I had to hire new CTO and a team of 6 in India as part of my handover.

At my new startup, I am setting up a team and I started hiring even before I started. I talked to freelancers from Upwork, super contractors in London, AWS solution architects, many outsourcing agencies from 20 to 200 staff in Serbia, Ukraine,  Belarus, Holland, South Africa., LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers, CTOs from London, Israel and Belgrade… and many recruitment consultants.

I posted jobs on job boards from LinkedIn to local job sites in Eastern Europe. I interviewed many candidiates in the first to final rounds, reviewed not as many CVs (engineers don’t know how to write CVs), built submitted code, performed many coding tests, talked to many managers. The key to success is to forget your ego and find value in candidates for the particular role you are hiring for. Forget your ego.

Categories
investing leadership life

The investing legend shares the secrets to his success

Warren Buffett is a true genius as he is able to simplify complex ideas into quotes that will stand the test of time. Warren Buffett spent his life dispensing advice to all who would listen, earning him the nickname of the Oracle of Omaha. In the 1960s, this advice came about twice a year in letters to investors in his investment partnerships. Starting a few years later, Warren Buffett’s wisdom was distilled through the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and the annual shareholder letter, and in the past 20 years, Warren Buffett has become a household name through appearances on TV and interviews in magazines.

Read on for Warren Buffett’s best quotes on life, investing, and his top five insights.

On life

1. “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

2. “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be a more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

3. “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.”

4. “What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.”

5. “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

6. “There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”

7. “Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.”

8. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

9. “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.”

10. “Long ago, Ben Graham taught me that ‘Price is what you pay; value is what you get.’ Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”

On investing

1. “The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.”

2. “Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

3. “I don’t look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.”

4. “In the short term, the market is a popularity contest. In the long term, the market is a weighing machine.”

5. “Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble”

6. “Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they’re doing.”

7. “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value.”

8. “The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”

9. “I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.”

10. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

Top five insights

Einstein said there are 5 ascending levels of intelligence: Smart, Intelligent, Brilliant, Genius, Simple. Warren Buffett’s top 5 insights each explain a truth about life or investing in the simplest way possible.

1. “I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”

It is a gross oversimplification to say that the key to investing is to buy low and sell high. This quote from when Warren Buffett has been the basis of his most successful investments over time and the basis of how you could have avoided the last few bubbles.

2. “I tell college students, when you get to be my age you will be successful if the people who you hope to have love you, do love you.”

Warren Buffett has spent a lifetime studying conventionally successful people. It’s important to hear that at the end of the day, money is not the thing that matters most in life.

3. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

Numerous greats including Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett have attributed their success to focus. Many people have long to-do lists and work on becoming more productive, when in fact, having a not-do list is more important if you want to do great things.

4. “I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage — leverage being borrowed money. You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing.”

People succeed in life countless different ways but failures group around a few key themes. As such, you learn more from people’s failures than people’s successes.

5. “What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word ‘selected’: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”

One of the quotes I hate the most in investing is Peter Lynch’s “Buy what you know” as it oversimplifies investing. The above quote is sort of the same idea but highlights that the important thing is being able to evaluate companies and also avoid companies you don’t understand. It’s that simple.

Warren Buffett is quoted so much because he has developed a great deal of wisdom over his lifetime. How did he do it?

The secret to Warren Buffett’s success

The secret to Warren Buffett’s success is that he continuously learns. Buffett is a far better investor today than he was 50 years ago. As Charlie Munger has explained:

Warren Buffett has become one hell of a lot better investor since the day I met him, and so have I. If we had been frozen at any given stage, with the knowledge we had, the record would have been much worse than it is. So the game is to keep learning, and I don’t think people are going to keep learning who don’t like the learning process.

While you may pick up a nugget of wisdom or two from the 25 best Warren Buffett quotes, committing yourself to a lifetime of learning is the best advice you should take from Warren Buffett.