My Mission

To help startup founders and product leaders be successful by providing clear, actionable, reliable tools and information about the startup journey and the product development process.

Engineer Your Organization: How to Turn Your Talent Pipeline Into a Team Factory

During heavy growth phases, we can sometimes spin up multiple new teams each month. We may try to onboard and organize those teams consistently, but more often they form organically, take on their own identity and culture, and mutate significantly from the teams you managed when your company was small.

Being able to quickly spin up effective teams is not only necessary to grow, it’s an existential imperative. After reaching product-market fit, the #1 reason growth stage companies fail is due to mismanaged growth.

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ecoATM Gazelle

Case Study: ecoATM

In this case study, I’ll show you how I coached a large, over-burdened engineering organization to take ownership of and improve their leadership, teamwork, process, and operations.

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Case Study: Sendlane

Case Study: Sendlane

In this case study, I’ll show you how I coached a fast-growing marketing automation platform to overcome three key existential crises at once.

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The Personal Retrospective Guide

At the end of every year, I spend the holidays reflecting on my year, what went well, what didn’t go well, and what I can do in the next year to be a better version of myself. I take all of my coaching clients through this process as well. This year, I decided to open-source my Personal Retrospective Guide so that everyone can benefit.

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Stop Churning and Get S#!T Done: How to Get Rid of Half-Baked Stories

I’ve been leading and coaching software development teams for fifteen years, and there is one problem that has surfaced in some form in every single team I’ve ever worked with. The problem begins when the Product Owner asks the engineers to work on a vague story with very little context and no acceptance criteria. This is called Requirements Churn.

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7 Ways to Easily Get Valuable Customer Feedback With Contextual Micro-Surveys

If you’ve ever managed or built a product, you know that gathering and analyzing customer feedback is hard.

It’s time-consuming; you have to spend hours prospecting customers and following up to schedule interviews or collect surveys. More often than not, the responses received aren’t specific enough or lack the context necessary for in-depth analysis. Not only do you have to collect, clean, and organize your data, but you also need it to be relevant and meaningful. What if I told you that there was a better solution for this?

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How Do You Know if Your Product Features Are Going to Make an Impact?

There’s nothing more inefficient than building the wrong things, so how do you know if your product features are going to make an impact? I’ve covered the Pirate Metrics framework as a way to evaluate and prioritize features from a business perspective, but what we really want to know is the impact a feature makes from the user’s perspective. For that, we need a slightly different model.

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