Presentation deck from SaaStock 2019

1. Scaling a Product Engineering
Team in your SAAS company
JOHN DORAN
Director Of Engineering @Phorest Salon Software

2. Startup

3. Growth

4. Scaling

5. Global Expansion

7. On Premise

8. All In One
POS, CRM, Reporting, Stock, Staff
management etc.
Appointments
Online and in salon booking
management
Marketing
Email and SMS
marketing for salons
Branded Apps
Personalised iOS and Android Apps for salons.
Cloud based

9. SMELL

10. ISSUE

11. RESOLUTION

12. Smell - “system down”, “lots of outages”

13. Conduct Blameless
Post Mortems

14. Know about issues
before anyone else does

15. Monitor
Stability
Number of outages per
month/week/day
SLA / Uptime %x

16. Mistakes happen

17. Healthy Platform
= Healthy Team

18. SMELL - “Deviation”, “X feature for customer”

19. Say No!
Aligning decisions to the strategy
It can be hard - what’s your alternative? API’s
Prioritise ruthlessly

20. Smell
- “backlog too big”
- “not motivated, I’m not sure what I’m working on next”
- “why can’t we build X?”
- “hard to make decisions with so many in the room”

21. Tribes

22. Smell
- “Drowning in tech debt”
- “outdated code/tech”

23. It’s real, give it
capacity

24. Continuous improvement

25. Smell
“We need person X for Y”

26. Encourage pairing
and collaboration

27. Foster a culture of
writing

28. Smells
- “Can’t ship on time”
- “Waiting for build”,
- “Need X person to test everything”
- “It’s working on my laptop”
- “Weeks to verify it works”

30. Focus on Quality

31. Track shipping frequency
How often do you ship features,
changes, experiments and bug fixes to prod?

32. Read these

33. Smell - “I can’t focus on one thing”

34. Stop building for
the sake of it

35. Project transparency
Clear picture of every initiative ?
What is really important?
WIP
Cut it down
Take Inventory

36. Smell
“Too many support requests for time to build
features”

37. Shared
understanding of
priority levels
P1 = Critical issue - down tools
P2 = Major issue - get it fixed
P3 = Normal - we can wait
P4 = Low - should fix, not urgent

38. Dedicated level of
support outside of
product work

39. Smell
- “too many direct reports”
- “no path for progression”
- “what is my job?”
- “unclear responsibilities/decision makers”

40. A Career Ladder

41. Growing People

42. These help to
attract and retain

43. @johnwildoran
john@phorest.com
NothingVentured.rocks
Thanks :)