One of the most important skills that an early stage technology management team really needs to have is the ability to objectively manage the startup budget. This is a very difficult task as senior managers are dealing with so many unknowns it is often hard to know where to spend – and where not to. […]
Pricing Fences, Promotions & 8 Deadly Sins of Customer Care
I recently got of the phone with AT&T “customer care”. It was an unusually frustrating experience, even by the standard of dealing with a multi-billion dollar corporation which has roots as a regulated utility. I had been transferred among 6 different departments over the period of a couple of days. As I write this, I’ve […]
Tech Company Employee Stock Options
One mildly controversial topic in our industry is whether to provide employee stock options broadly within a tech company. Mind you, this isn’t very controversial in VC-funded companies. The only discussion in that environment is how much and to who – not whether or not. But VC-backed companies represent only a tiny fraction of the […]
Building an Effective Tech Company Management Team
The process for successfully following this article’s headline may seem pretty obvious; hire great people! At a very simplistic level, of course, that is the answer. But as you look deeper into this very important activity the situation appears much more complicated and nuanced. First of all, there is a limited number of “great people” […]
7 Biggest Issues Faced by Management Teams in Mature Software Companies
So you’ve broken through that difficult startup phase, become profitable and maybe even have reached a dominant share of you market segment. Times are good and that usually lasts for a while. You’ve become what’s known as a mid-sized or even a large software company. In much of this article we’ll refer to this stage […]
