The 5-Minute Startup CTO #75

Re-teaming, Bootstrapping product, Scaling with simplicity, Technical debt roadmaps

Hi there,

Hope you’re well! Here are this week’s 4 tips:

👭 People

Jakob Wolman explains how he approached the challenge of organising developers into teams, and how often to re-team. In short: his team of ca15 developers re-team every 6 weeks, and this seems to be going well so far.

A very interesting read and approach - time will tell whether it really works at scale (with much larger teams), or is just a good way to manage a team of 15-20.

🥫 Product

How would you start building a product management team, and what type of product person would you first look for?

Ibrahim Bashir describes 3 types of PMs - those who start, scale or sustain the team and business, and discusses how to find and embed them into your team.

🔄 Process

A really good write-up by Mark Rees on his experience of scaling Xero from 10 teams to over 100, and how to address the complexity which always appear at scale: simplicity.

We could respond with solutions that match the complexity of the problem, like large agile frameworks, rigid structures and processes, and the endless search for the bleeding edge idea. But in my experience, the solution to complexity is almost never more complexity. It’s simplicity.

⌨️ Tech

Scott Triglia on his approach to tackling technical debt, and roadmapping that work. Focus on business outcomes - couldn’t agree more!

Until next time, have a great week

Fabrice

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The 5-Minute Startup CTO: every Sunday, 4 top insights in 5 minutes for startup CTOs and Tech Leads. Hand-picked by Fabrice.