The book
Great products flow from diverse teams, deliberate processes, and a culture that nurtures different ideas and perspectives. With our book, you’ll learn how to build humane organizations that focus on their people, first and foremost.
We believe that a business can do more than focus solely on profit. It can strive to provide a good place to work. In this book, you can learn directly from our experiences in building organizations in this spirit, from our highs and lows, our wins and our failures.
Our book, "The Intentional Organization," is coming soon. We'll gladly keep you posted on our progress!
More about the book
Getting a business off the ground is hard enough. As a founder, you not only have to pay attention to the market and your customers, you also have to build an environment that allows everyone working with you to contribute to the business, providing them opportunities to grow and to shine. It’s easy to forget about that part and focus on what you started out with. We get it. We’ve been there.
More often than not, it feels like there’s nowhere to turn for help on how to sweat all those details of an organization. Processes, decision making, resolving conflict, setting clear priorities, communicating proactively, running effective meetings, and providing meaningful feedback. Wouldn’t it be great to have a manual that you can turn to in situations where you’re just looking for some practical advice? Where you can learn from the successes and also the failures of others? We agree. We wish that kind of book existed. So we set out to write it: a handy reference that you can go back to when you’re feeling stuck.
“The Intentional Organization” is our take on this kind of guide. We’ve sweated the details of building not just great products, but also great organizations building those products. We’ve been mentoring and coaching leaders on these topics for years, working to instill our knowledge and experience of building organizations that, first and foremost, respects its people.
What you’ll learn:
- Leading and managing teams of humans
- Removing uncertainty, providing clarity
- Crafting processes, e.g. for decision making
- Running effective meetings
- Building work and personal relationships
- Working across different cultures and timezones
- Communicating proactively and with clarity
- Providing actionable feedback
- Creating inclusive work environments
- Debugging and improving your organization
Latest Journal
21 May 2024
What’s my Role as the CTO? The Three Pillars of Executive Work
“What is my role as CTO?” is one of the most common questions I discuss with my clients. If they don’t bring it up on their own, it’s the first question I bring up. On the surface, this should be easy to answer, right? Technology, code, features, product, and other hand-waving gestures using fuzzy terms that aren’t helpful. The reality is that most people we work with don’t have a clear picture of what their role is, what responsibilities are tied to it, and what they contribute to the business as a whole.
7 May 2024
Rewirement
Often, when I introduce myself, I say, “I have grown up in tech.” It’s true. I’ve gone from Product Manager to CPO. I’ve co-founded and led a venture-backed startup all the way from idea to acquisition. My equity gained value more than a handful of times, which is a rarity in the world of startups. I’ve gone from leading a bootstrapped company with three employees to teams of hundreds at a publicly-traded monolith doing billions of dollars in revenue. I’ve seen and experienced a lot. And yet, I knew that I was done and ready to call it quits over a year ago. I recently left my executive leadership position at Mailchimp and, in doing so, I left a nearly 30-year career in tech.
16 September 2022
The First Intentional Organization Offsite
After three years of not meeting in person, we traveled to far flung Nova Scotia in Canada to reconnect and come up with a plan for 2023. Here is everything we did to make it successful and to ensure there is plenty of room for serendipity during our time together.
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