Jose Montes de Oca

💯 If your team is drowning in support tickets and customer "rough edges" you should probably sit back and evaluate if you have a viable product. At the very least, you should evaluate if your product team is correctly focused on the needs of your customers when this pattern emerges. "Jessica pointed out that if our solution was to hire someone to deal with customer issues, then next week when we grew more we’d have to hire another person, then another, and so on. Her point was that the real solution isn’t solving tickets, it’s listening to customers and building a better product so customers never need to write in the first place." "In a sense, every customer support ticket is a privilege – someone took time out of their day to write about how to improve your product. But it’s also a failure – you could’ve saved them that time by making the product better and more intuitive in the first place. You can’t out-hire a bad product, or compensate for poor taste with a big support team." Customer feedback is a gift. Don't squander it or pawn the problem off on a man-power to solve it. A pile-up here is *always* a sign that your product direction needs improvement.

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Video from my recent talk is now available! Learn about how we're building our own developer tools to make frontend engineering fast and fun at Datadog

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🎤*tap, tap, tap* Is this thing on?? If you're letting fear get in the way of using metrics to extend your management style, you're missing out on chances to better support your ICs. Check out my talk to learn how my team and I employed them safely, leveling up our 1-1 conversations around job satisfaction, burnout prevention, self-advocacy, and healthier team dynamics. ✨✨ https://lnkd.in/dPyJjRjx

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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I got an opportunity to speak with the power duo from MongoDB - Tara Hernandez and Stacey King Poling about Developer productivity at MongoDB and how should teams think about setting up a DevProd org. Tara and Stacey are some of the most experienced leaders in developer productivity. The whole episode is full of powerful nuggets. Listen to full episode on Substack, Spotify, YouTube or Apple podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gFJD_UHV Some key learnings 👇 - Metrics should be used with caution and in context, as they can be easily misinterpreted or incentivize the wrong behaviors. - Surveys are valuable for understanding developer sentiment, but qualitative data and feedback should also be considered. - The focus should be on outcomes and meeting goals, and managers should prioritize deliverables and create a positive culture. - Building a developer productivity organization requires understanding the business value, educating oneself, and getting buy-in from senior leaders and engineers. Early investment in developer productivity and building good habits is crucial for scaling a company's engineering team. - To change the culture internally, start by identifying and improving one specific area that needs attention. #developerproductivity #developerexperience

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🔥 New episode of The Headcount People drops TOMORROW 🔥 In Episode 12, I have a conversation with my friend Alisa Avelar, the former VP People at Docker, Inc, Modo Labs, and Toptal. I have to say, Alisa strikes the perfect tone in this pod: speaking both to the head and to the heart. Her ability to drive strategic value and outcomes to the C-suite PLUS serve as a trusted resource to employees is what makes her such a dynamic HR leader. Whether you're an experienced HR exec or aspiring to lead a People function one day, this podcast will be a great listen. Here is just a short snippet of what Alisa has to share – and be sure to check back tomorrow for the full pod! #podcast #peopleleadership #hrleadership #theheadcountpeople

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Why should you join Eventbrite? Reason #4 : 🌟 Striking the Balance: Prioritizing Work-Life Harmony 🌟 At Eventbrite, we understand the importance of achieving a healthy work-life balance. That's why we're committed to creating an environment where our employees can thrive both personally and professionally. Here's what work-life balance means to us: 1. Respect for Personal Time: We respect our employees' personal time and encourage them to disconnect and recharge outside of work hours. We understand that true productivity and creativity come from taking breaks, pursuing hobbies, and spending time with loved ones. 2. Wellness Initiatives: We prioritize employee well-being through wellness initiatives, such as mindfulness workshops, fitness challenges, and mental health resources. We believe that a healthy mind and body are essential for peak performance and overall happiness. 3. Lead by Example: Our leadership team leads by example, demonstrating the importance of work-life balance in their own lives. They encourage boundaries, prioritize self-care, and emphasize the value of unplugging and recharging. At Eventbrite, we believe that a healthy work-life balance is essential for long-term success and fulfilment. Join us and experience the difference of working in an environment where your well-being is valued and supported. Do check this for open positions : https://lnkd.in/d2k84-cV #eventbrite #comejoinus #youareinvited #hiring #linkedinjobs #hiringalert #jobs

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🚨 Announcing the 2nd cohort of the FundraisingHackers.com “Seed+ bootcamp” we’re hosting together with Slava Solonitsyn (ex-VC and top YC founder, $180M+ raised), read below. A few weeks ago we ended the 1st cohort and it truly was a blast 🎇 14 startups across Seed, Seed+/Series A stages (and US/Europe/Asia) participated, including YC alums and exited founders. A bunch of them have already successfully raised. Some are in the process right now. Some have postponed their raise saving them a bunch of time/nerves not spent on failed fundraising. This pic is from the final workshop we’ve hosted. If you’re fundraising (or planning to in the next 3-6 months) you defo wanna check this out. This is not a course — we’ve already outsourced our “parallel fundraising playbook” (comment with “playbook” if you want the link). Instead, we provide you with a deep dive into YC-style best fundraising practices and give you a supportive environment to go and raise, period: 1. Share the “off the record” ins and outs of the parallel fundraising playbook with real-life examples/stories we’re never going to share anywhere else publicly 2. Help you understand your momentum and fundraising timeline so as not to make the wrong (too early/too late) decision 3. Provide you with an accountability group of peer founders (your first taskforce members if you don’t have any yet!) 4. Help you to refine your story/narrative and pitch materials to meet the expectations of top VCs 5. Work through your challenges/questions during office hours/group workshops 6. Give you access to our exclusive FundraisingHackers.com workspace with tons of useful content: from investor databases to guides, tools, templates, and much more Places are limited and you can get in on a first come first serve basis, so hurry up and apply, link is in the comments.

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Every day is a reminder that startups are unpredictable as hell. As alums of YCombinator's Summer 12 batch, we've long taken pride in being "the batch that broke YC" - as PG calls us. So it tickles me to no end to see this in the 2024 YC Top Companies list: "The S12 batch is the best represented, with 5 companies on the list: Benchling, Coinbase, Instacart, SmartAsset and Zapier" 🤣💪 #ycombinator #ycs12 #startups https://lnkd.in/gNDewZfn

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I am looking forward to chatting with Michael Lopp today. Tune in at 1 PM ET if you'd like to hear a good chat about an important and controversial topic. #engineeringmanagement #engineeringleadership https://lnkd.in/e95U8pyZ

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Last week, we re-released the Vanta API for customers in REST. I'm excited about a lot of our ships, and I'm *really* into the move to REST. I say this as one of the folks who chose GraphQL initially 🙃 . Back in 2017-2018, GraphQL seemed like the future, and so we built on it. While it has some nice properties (e.g. lowering the stakes of changes), it never really took off, and most engineers are more comfortable with REST. Good intentions, wrong technology bet in retrospect. If you're shipping, you'll get some of your technology bets wrong, and all you can do is acknowledge reality ("our customers prefer to work in REST") and build. Huge kudos to Jan Castor and Mikaela Gilbert for leading the project at Vanta. By our count, at least 17 other engineers at Vanta contributed endpoints, architecture, and documentation to this release. (Never win alone!) Now, with our REST API, customers can: * Automate processes in Vanta to minimize clicks and human error. Examples include auto-uploading documents or policies, bulk assigning owners to resources, or bulk offloading employees. * Programmatically extract information from Vanta into external reports that aggregate data from multiple systems. For example, you can automatically export test status information from Vanta and Trust Center viewer data to a Business Intelligence tool to help power enterprise-wide compliance dashboards. * Build custom integrations so Vanta can run automated tests against systems the platform does not already integrate with, including on-premise or custom applications. * 🔜 Automatically initiate external workflows to improve your security posture through fast remediation of security gaps. For instance if a critical test in Vanta fails, an external workflow or script that monitors this test can automatically initiate remediation.

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In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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I’ve been doing a ton of interviewing lately, and I’ve come to remember how much I appreciate it as a time to meet colleagues that I genuinely want to work with in some capacity: even if I don’t recommend we hire them. While this industry is huge, the professional circles we end up running in per domain are small worlds. Everyone I meet is a chance to make professional connections with people that turns into a chance to work together in the future—be it collaboration on a paper, peer-reviews of each others’ work, a customer using my products, or a coworker on my team. I love hearing about the work people are proud of and what they’ve built. So, I’ve started closing my interviews with “Thank you for taking the time to tell me about your work and passions, I am inspired, and I really hope we get to work together in the future.” I hire for my company, but the interview? It’s more than my job; it’s part of my career and professional network, and I genuinely look forward to making the connection. I’ve rarely met someone that didn’t inspire me, and I’m grateful I get paid to do it. Humans that build things are amazing, and you don’t have to look very hard to see it if you just slow down and see the spectacularly complex and gifted human sitting across the table from you. I hate that we’ve created this environment where people are so anxious coming in the door because we attach so much of our self worth to getting the “hire” nod from the team. It can be so much more than this. There’s an abundance of what we can all learn from each other, and the competitive nature of it does not serve the interests or well-being of builders, or even the long-term interests of the companies to which we belong.

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Founders, especially non-technical founders, let me save you some time. This is a Requirements Matrix. If you're an application founder, let me re-introduce you. This is a Requirements Matrix. It's your best friend. When utilized fully, a Requirements Matrix can: ☑ Clarify your app uses ☑ Invite collaboration in requirements brainstorming sessions ☑ Align developers to the overall vision ☑ Identify key resources that will be needed to support the overall app (architecturally and talent-wise) ☑ Be the basis for the product roadmap ☑ Build requirements that ultimately go into your requirements management tool like Jira ☑ Identify scope creep ☑ Manage stakeholder expectations If you haven't heard of one or you would like to try it out, you can save a copy from the link in the comments. Follow for more tips or if you're curious on the adventures of a #founder in Cleveland! #techfounder #femalesintech #founderlife #productmanagement

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Sup fam!! Relationships are everything!! They're the core of your engineering platform. Your team's design docs, software patterns, pull requests, and GitOps workflows all need to pass through a complex network of relationships before becoming meaningful to stakeholders. Before that, they're just bytes sitting on Jeff Bezos' disks. How are your relationships doing? Which relationships need some light touching up? Which ones need some serious investment? How about that one person on that one team? How about on _your_ team? Are you tracking these gaps with the same effectiveness you're tracking tech debt? It takes an intentional effort to build meaningful connections and to show peers you're a stakeholder in _their_ success. It's worth your time -- not to mention you'll feel great!! Want to optimize your engineering platform? Start by investing in your relationships!

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As a technical founder, one of the biggest challenges in scaling from $1M to $10M ARR is balancing two mindsets: the creativity and passion that helped you build an incredible product, and the operational discipline needed to lead a growing organization. To evolve from an IC to a founder-CEO, focus on these 3 areas: 1️⃣ Establish a hiring playbook Develop a structured process to assess candidates using scorecards for their resume, interview, and reference checks. Grade each on a 1-10 scale and dig deeper if a reference doesn't give a 9 or 10. 2️⃣ Delegate, but stay hands-on Empower your team, but also seek out the "ground truth" - join customer calls, have skip-level conversations with ICs, and interview key candidates yourself. Lean in to understand the details of each executive's role. Only then can you set expectations and evaluate the performance of your team. 3️⃣ Define a culture that can scale Be proactive about articulating your culture's core tenets. Approach it with the same rigor and customer-centricity you bring to building products. A strong culture is the "shared operating system" that allows a large organization to function as a cohesive whole. Learn more from my conversations with Doug Winter of Seismic, Mohit Aron of Cohesity, and Sanjit Biswas of Samsara in the latest edition of B2BaCEO: https://lnkd.in/emsvFN9q

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There are two main things we did to give ourselves more runway with Harlow while bootstrapping the business: 1. Cut costs so that we operate at break-even, which extends our business runway infinitely to give us more time to do focused tests to figure out PMF and which growth channels will work for us. 2. Brought on consulting clients so we could make money, which extends our personal runway infinitely by allowing us to feel more safe and comfortable while building. How are my other bootstrapped founders making it work?

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I've failed hard at building a startup for over a year (but hopefully not for much longer). It's been a year since we founded Serra (YC S23), and in that time I've failed and learned—a lot. We've went through 3 pivots, talked to 100s of people, and I've learned a ton about myself in the process. If I could turn back the clock, 3 things that I would immediately do differently: 𝟏. 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮’𝐫𝐞 𝐚 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐈𝐧 𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 (𝐀𝐒𝐀𝐏). • 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐬—self-explanatory • 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐬—much harder. Learn how to properly dig into a users’ pain points, don’t ask leading questions, and drop your conceptions before each call. • 𝐀𝐬𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲’𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐚𝐲—talk is cheap, money is not. Worst case, you find out what you’re making isn’t wanted, which is honestly the best case. 𝟐. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰 𝐛𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐟𝐟 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭. If you're sweating thinking about doing it, then it’s probably the right thing to do. A personal example is as a recent college grad, I felt intimidated talking to more experienced people. I spent the first few months avoiding speaking openly with these people because I didn’t want to seem dumb. This was the worst thing I could do, as the only way to not be dumb is to learn, and the best way to learn is to openly ask. 𝟑. 𝐌𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜. We viewed pivoting as running a series of experiments as fast as possible. Our hypothesis would be that “X is a big pain point for a certain ICP” or “Y is a solution a certain ICP would pay for.” Then, to collect data, we sought to talk to as many users as possible. We celebrated every yes, and most importantly every no, as each no helped us disprove our hypothesis faster. Learn to also recognize false signals (one-off customers you can’t find elsewhere) and set KPIs for each week. 𝟒. 𝐁𝐞 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞. Recognize equally your strengths and weaknesses, celebrate your successes (no matter how small they might seem), lean on your cofounder(s), friends and family. I learned to break up tasks into smaller chunks. Instead of “we’re building a unicorn,” it became “focus on talking to 10 users.” Then it became “disqualify this idea within a week.” Then it became “close X deals this week.” Take small steps to the bigger goal & celebrate every time you hit that step. ======== If you’ve made it this far, thank you. We’re finally coming out of pivot hell and launching Serra (www.serra.io), an AI-driven search engine for recruiters to find the best-fit candidates. If you’re looking to help find signal among thousands of inbound applicants in your ATS or looking to find outbound gems, would love to hop on a call with you here, https://lnkd.in/geF28MZ9, or shoot me an email at alan@serra.io. Here's to the craziest rollercoaster!

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