#67 - The best teams are self-organising + Sad times for Wonga + That Growth mindset
Greetings from Turkey. A very quick getaway and a chance to pile up on cheese, break and kebabs.
Hope you’ve enjoyed your summer as much as I have. I feel recharged and ready to work with great people this year so hit me up if you’re building the future and using an app/website to control the user experience. As long as you have some customers and data, we’ll be able to keep score
BIG THANKS to all the new subscribers.
If you have a friend that’s into Tech, forward them this newsletter. Trust me, it’s cheaper than buying them a present and they can’t say you didn’t “bring them”
Let's Build Great Products
The 3 Cs of cross-functional teamwork
Intercom is a product led company and I have met some of the talent at Intercom who describe themselves as problem solvers.
What I like about about this article is that it talks about how cross-functional teams operate when there is no big project to work towards - for the most part, good autonomous crossx teams are self-organising.
It’s really cool what the Product Education team at Intercom is doing to educate internal teams via docs, videos, webinars and messaging. The role of learning and development is more and more important.
Sunday Reads
It's all peak for Wonga as they collapse
Wonga was considering “all options” a week ago but now its all over jackie as they are going into administration. They got got by the FCA for loans taken out before 2014.
The Financial Conduct Authority ruled four years ago that Wonga’s debt collection practices were unfair and ordered it to pay £2.6m in compensation to 45,000 customers.
Suggestion: the British taxpayer bails out Wonga at a very reasonable 698% interest..
In 2012, these Education Startups were trying to bring coding to the masses
So imagine 6 years ago, before coding became even more mainstream.
Neck for neck, CodeAcademy, Udacity, Khan Academy, Coursera and Edmodo were all nominated for the Crunchies Awards (Silicon Valley’s version of the Oscars)
Code Academy won, but it’s I wanted to share this because it goes back to the core reason they started.
Berkshire Hathaway confirms investment in India's Paytm
Warren Buffets company made an investment in India’s mobile payments company.
Berkshire wouldn’t have been caught dead investing even in listed tech companies until a few years ago, let alone a privately held tech firm that is not yet profitable and likely to continue hemorrhaging cash for a while.
Getting a bite of India’s booming internet economy. Sounds like not even Berkshire wanted to miss out on this one.
Real Work vs. Imaginary Work – Signal v. Noise
You get all the learning from doing
1% of Salesforce's Revenue Makes a Unicorn
This thought piece is from a respected VC. He is breaking down why if you start a business tomorrow that is able to cleave 1% of revenue from Salesforce, you will have built a billion-dollar business.
Short article on the growth mindset at work
Looks like more of what has been popularised by Carol Dweck’s book is turning into thought pieces.
This is a short article on what looks like at work
Helpful Tool(s)
Unifies all your work tools in one neat & productive interface.
I can’t say I have tried it myself (ironically I am trying to declutter from too many apps).
But doesn’t mean I can’t share this