9 Things I Wish I Would Have Told My 2013 Self: Lessons Learned from 9 Years with Heap's Former CTO | Dan Robinson, Advisor/ Former CTO @ Heap
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9 Things I Wish I Would Have Told My 2013 Self: Lessons Learned from 9 Years with Heap's Former CTO Dan Robinson, Advisor/ Former CTO @ Heap
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9 Things I Wish I Would Have Told My 2013 Self: Lessons Learned from 9 Years with Heap's Former CTO | Dan Robinson, Advisor/ Former CTO @ Heap
- 1. Lessons Learned from Building Heap: Advice for My 2013 Self 1 Dan Robinson Ex-CTO Heap @danlovesproofs
- 2. #1: What Your Job Is And what it isn't 2
- 3. Your job is to make the company win
- 4. Keep your identity small and flexible
- 5. #2: Strategy should be "Obvious" 5
- 6. SaaS is Checkers, not Chess
- 7. The hard part of strategy is context
- 9. #3: Taste the Soup 9
- 10. Use the product; talk to users Keep doing things that don't scale
- 11. #4: Energy > Time 11
- 12. Understand the energetic cost of everything
- 13. #5: The Value of Experience And the limits of "intelligence" 13
- 14. Pattern Recognition Hard to know what "good" is if you haven't seen it
- 15. Playbooks You can do things 3x faster when you've done them before
- 16. Credibility
- 17. #1: What Your Job Is #2: Strategy should be "Obvious" #3: Taste the Soup #4: Energy > Time #5: The Value of Experience 17
- 18. Be nice to people! Everyone around you is trying their best! 18
- 19. Thank you! Get in touch: @danlovesproofs robinson.dan.joseph@gmail.com 19
Editor's Notes
- Your job will turn over almost completely, every 18 months Only constant is recruiting Get used to letting go Let go of one monkey bar to grab the next one Get used to hiring leaders
- Keep your identity minimal and flexible Get a coach
- SaaS is checkers, not chess I'm putting this in slightly provocative terms to make a point Good strategy usually looks "obvious" We didn't get things wrong because we missed a second order consequence As an engineer, be careful! Your instincts can be seductively wrong Clever-seeming is bad because it's usually fragile Find big tailwinds
- We did get things wrong because we were missing context First principles thinking has limits: timing, unknown unknowns
- When you zoom in on a great feature, you'll see more features The reason is that human needs and organizational needs are fractal, and those are your customers Expect obvious-in-retrospect follow-on investments for any successful feature Expect competitors' functionality to have more than you can see Your strategy should reflect this This becomes your moat
- Keep doing things that don't scale: using the product, talking to users You will make mistakes by trying to run the company with too much distance KPIs without soup-tasting are hollow and incomplete Beware of other leaders who don't bring this philosophy Story about product bootcamp Waves We made this a value
- People's energy is even more precious than their time Understand the energetic cost of a meeting, a chore, a combative teammate... As a leader, you can be uniquely exhausting Connection to identity, "innocuous, shy nerd" You can also be energizing, if you can find a way to do it authentically Leave people energized and enthusiastic whenever you can. Be relentlessly earnest, never ever cynical. Remind people how cool and important what they're doing is. Find ways to be uplifting in the midst of a slog. Find ways to disagree without being exhausting. Praise people publicly You aren't a cheerleader
- You can compare two things, but you don't know if you're comparing C- and C+ or C- and A+ You can spot problems that other people don't see, because you've seen the absence of those problems
- "playbooks" that let you do things 3x faster when you've done them before Matters at growth stage But they still have to think critically
- Attract more capable people Spend less time aligning internally Pattern Recognition, Playbooks, Credibility But they still have to be smart and low ego, still have to be soup-tasters Don't get fooled by a resume