Our Blog

When we relaunched this site, we chose to use next.js. With that, several pages including our docs are now in markdown.

Nicole Rashied, customer success manager at Intercom: Customer success – every business wants to invest in it but only a few know what it actually entails or how to do it well. There are a lot of words that get thrown around with customer success: problems to be solved, implementation, product experts, expansion, strategic partners,

Basecamp has a nice collection of philosophies and day-to-day practices that help guide how they communicate with each other at Basecamp. The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basecamp? How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in

Entrepreneurship can be a long, arduous, and gruelling journey, but if you ever wanted proof that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, look no further than Manny Padda. Padda is an entrepreneur, educator, angel investor, and philanthropist. He is the founder of New Avenue Capital as well as the founder and managing director of PM

Fiona Lee: You’ve probably heard this before: “What gets you to your first $50 million is not what’s going to get you to $100 million.” We’ve thought about this truth a lot during the last few months as we’ve been going through our annual planning. As part of the process, we’ve spent a lot of

Ryan Singer: Debates continue to rage about the role of UX designers, user research, and how far knowledge about the user should permeate the organization. On one extreme, UX is seen as a specialized pocket of knowledge that informs the definition of projects and sets requirements. On the other, UX is something for which the

Derek Skaletsky, writing for the Intercom blog: If you have followed us over at Sherlock, you will likely have heard us say many times that product engagement is the lifeblood of any SaaS business. This is because the entire SaaS business model is dependent on people using (and getting value from) your product consistently over time.

Frank Landman, writing for ReadWriteWeb: There are seemingly countless stories of tech innovators who simply woke up with a brilliant idea, got investments to build it out, and ended up becoming billionaires. Of course, these stories are extremely rare, but they are exciting to think about—especially when you wake up with a brilliant tech idea

Dan Kim on “The Bezos way“: Jeff Bezos has always been one of those people whose ideas and thinking make a lot of sense to me. When he talks, I listen. So when I recently came across a fantastic interview with Jeff Bezos, I jumped right in. The entire interview is great and I really

​Do the ends justify the means? Is it worth lowering your standards and giving up your principles in order to find a better outcome? Many times, the means are the ends. How we choose to act changes who we choose to become. The way we choose to get to where we’re going defines what it’s going to

Devon Campbell: End-to-end testing is awesome because it mirrors the user’s experience. Where you might need a ton of unit tests to get good coverage (the kind where you test that a function returns a value you expect), you can write a single end-to-end test that acts like a real human as it tests several

Des Traynor: Spending money is very easy. Spending money effectively is very hard. There are lots of dodgy people & service providers out there who will promise the world, send the invoices, and deliver mediocrity six months late. Or worse. It’s helpful if you can eliminate these chancers from your considerations early on, to make

Claire Lew: Looking at the clock. Staring into the distance. Short, nondescript answers. A CEO recently told me how he’d frequently see this body language from an employee during their one-on-one meetings. Flat. Disinterested. Preoccupied. It felt lousy to witness, but it’d always been this way. He’d silently concluded that he was wasting both of

Hootsuite’s Ryan Holmes: Mention “tech jobs” and thoughts typically turn to developers — the programmers and engineers who translate great ideas into working technology and keep the platforms we all use humming along. But the reality is that it’s impossible to scale and sustain most software platforms today without a highly capable, highly trained sales team. Indeed,

Drago Crnjac: Breaking things and fixing them again is one of the best ways to learn. I learned this lesson early, thanks to my younger sister and her Japanese robotic toy dog. Somehow, I convinced her to let me take apart her robodog so I could see how it works. “I’ll put it back together.

Andy Raskin: Last month, I was enjoying the remarkably good crab cake and poached eggs at Just for You Café in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, when I overheard a mentoring session taking place at the next table. I recognized the mentor as the famous, fifty-something ex-CEO of a household-brand Internet company; the mentee, I pieced

Claire Lew: I was running a leadership training a few months ago, when a CEO said this to me… “I think I know why it’s so easy to become a bad manager, even when we don’t mean to be: It’s because of the little trade-offs.” I nodded and smiled. I knew exactly what he meant

Seth Godin: Back when Superman used to change into his outfit in a phone booth, the question was: where does he put Clark’s shoes? Because even if he could compress them with his super strength, they’d be ruined. Organizations that need to adopt different personas often get into trouble. On one hand, most of the

Remember Pokémon GO? Of course you do because it was all you heard about for a few quick months in the summer of 2016. With millions of people downloading and playing the game, retailers and restaurants leapt at the opportunity to sponsor in-game experiences. Players flocked from location to location to virtually battle one another

Ohans Emmanuel: I have heard lots of developers say they hate CSS. In my experience, this comes as a result of not taking the time to learn CSS. CSS isn’t the prettiest ‘language,’ but it has successfully powered the styling of the web for over 20 years now. Not doing too badly, huh? However, as