Notes for February 10th 2023
- In the recent wave of tech layoffs, I've seen some really odd behaviours from folks close to my former employer.
- The weirdest is folks who've been laid off giving a public outpouring of empathy and/or sympathy to the company. Which is bizarre, and feels orchestrated at worst, cultish at best. And to be clear, I cherish my time at that company and respect and admire what's been built there.
- Another odd one is folks posting advice to those laid-off without any prompt, or experience. Including someone I know who's now a CRO at a tech company, who was advising laid off people to go into consulting and to use his software with a discount code. Mindless.
- Thinking more about these layoffs and what's coming for tech. In my mind tech is going to need to "grow up." Which means:
- EBITDA (roughly cash after expenses) will be significantly more important than it has in the past. Tech companies got away with future potential as a measure of success, but with no timeline for when that potential would be realised.
- Opex is always important, but I think it'll be scrutinised more. I worked at a company that had a giant black hole every year because it ran a conference. The ROI was rough to estimate, but it was there, somewhere. Now companies will need to have much better measurements of where Opex is having impact, and what the ROI is.
- Free cash flow is easy in tech because margins are quite good. Or they tend to be. So this will be critically important.
- What are people doing? Investors tended to ignore the mad roles that tech companies have hired. I know people who are in "internal branding" roles, for example. Which have very little ROI to an investor.
- Growth rates are important to investors, but carrying that with some yard stick on what it means, what you'll do with it and knowing why net new customers are coming on board is important. Also, infinitely chasing net new users is pointless if you're losing users out the back door with poor experiences. Install-base selling often gets tacked onto strategy later, but should be a big part of growth rates.
- In scaleup businesses, organisational alignment isn't some magic trick that just happens. It requires enormous amounts of effort.
- You need to give organisations space to ... well, organise themselves.
- Communication is critical in all aspects of a company, no matter the size. But impact is measured by clear, obvious communication that is repeated and repeatable. If you feel like you're over-communicating, you're probably about right.
- Alignment across a scaleup needs to be respected. Especially by senior folks who can easily derail things.
- We're in kickoff week, and I am the orchestrator of a session being repeated across each region (AMER, EMEA & APAC). I'm also co-hosting the EMEA session. I know the content, understand the audience and built the slides. Yet the pressure and fear of being bad are really present for me. By the time I hit publish on this post, it'll all be done and I'm sure it was fine.
- I coach a few people, and this week did a brief (2 hour) coaching learning session with $job. It was funny that, in breakout scenarios, it was obvious who actually coaches folks outside of the work realm. Folks who don't use specific workplace language, product-specific callouts, etc. Which is probably reasonably effective, but not as effective as empathetic questioning, SBI/GROW modelling and giving folks the opportunity to breathe through the discussion.
- SBI: Situation, Behaviour, Impact. Focused on the past.
- GROW: Goal, Reality, Options, Wrap-up. Focused on the future.
- Microsoft released a new, OpenAI-powered Bing this week. And while I'm sure it's great at helping decipher information, the UX is atrocious. Going to the site to search for something features 9 different boxes prompting the user to do different permutations of things. I realise most users probably just type into the search bar on their browser, but that is poor.
- Results page are markedly different to the homepage. It looks, frankly, like Google. But when you scroll there is a nasty UI that pops into the screen to prompt you to find new things.
- I think I'll stick to DuckDuckGo for now, and hope for some iterative improvements there. But for the most part, DDG suits me well for search.
- Conversely, Google are my least favourite option for search. How the mighty have fallen. And all because they so desperately want me to click an advert instead of providing true value to me, as a user.
- Error-tolerance is something we don't measure enough. And measurement can be difficult.
- What is the "thorniness" of a problem, and what tolerance does someone have for it going wrong? Good example is in payments. It's a hugely thorny problem to make a seamless payments experience, and the tolerance for slowness or errors is, quite rightly, low.
- Bring that to something more controllable, on my team, I've been thinking about what thorny things they work on, and what their tolerance limits might be with the jobs to be done. I think the thornier the issue, the more tolerance for issues there might be given the types of people we have on the team. But often, the less thorny things (admin tasks, communications) wind up being super thorny because they get put on the back-burner.
- Mastodon active users across the Fediverse has slowed, but the net of that recent growth is 1m active users more than it did a year ago. And undoubtedly, Musk will do something naive that forces even more folks onto Mastodon.
- Importantly, IMO, those 1m net new Mastodon active users are people are the top-end of power users that advertisers want to target, etc.