The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company’s code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet. Like debt, it’s there, you can live with it, but it is a drag on the health of the technology organization and has hard servicing costs. It’s never fun to pay down technical debt, which takes time away from developing new products and new features and is not really appreciated by anyone outside the engineering organization. That last point is a mistake, and I can’t encourage…
Archives / November, 2012
Not Just About Us
Not Just About Us When we updated our values this year, we felt there were a couple critical business elements missing from this otherwise “how” series of statements. One thing missing was our clients and users! So we added this value to our list: Not Just About Us: We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy. This may be one of the most straightforward statements of all our values, so this will be a short post. We serve lots of constituencies at Return Path. And we always talk about how we’re a “People First” organization and what that means. I suppose that inherently means we are a “Client Second” organization, though I’m not sure…
Book Short: The Challenger Sale
Book Short: The Challenger Sale I’ve written a couple times in the past about how we sell at Return Path. I’ve written about our principle sales methodology for the past decade, SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham (and Major Account Strategy, also by Rackham, which is basically SPIN Selling for Account Managers), which focuses on a specific technique for solution selling by using questioning to get the prospective client to identify his or her own needs, as well as Jeffrey Gitomer’s two short books, the Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers, which are long on sales questioning techniques. And I also wrote this post about another book called Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace…
Two Ears, One Mouth
Two Ears, One Mouth Brace yourself for a post full of pithy quotes from others. I’m not sure how we missed this one when drafted our original values statements at Return Path years ago, because it’s always been central to the way we operate. We aren’t just the world’s biggest data-driven email intelligence company – we are a data-driven organization. So another one of our newly written Core Values is: Two Ears, One Mouth: We ask, listen, learn, and collect data. We engage in constructive debate to reach conclusions and move forward together. I’m not sure which of my colleagues first said this to me, but I’m going to give credit to Anita, our long-time head of sales (almost a…
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!)
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!) One of the things I’ve often thought over the years since starting Return Path in 1999 is that there’s no instruction manual anywhere for how to be a CEO. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren’t…and they’re often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general. That became one of the driving forces behind the creation of my blog, OnlyOnce (because “you’re only a first time CEO once”) back in 2004. Now, over 700 blog posts later, I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book based on this blog called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company. The book is going…
Job 1
Job 1 The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly, Job 1: We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage. The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?” This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.” I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small. Neither…