An open learning environment is where the company is receptive to not having all the answers, is comfortable with uncertainty, and strives to get better every day.

It means being flexible instead of rigid and having a culture where people continually seek the truth. You want knowledge and t...

• Off-the-shelf software is for general purposes and does not give an edge over your competitors.
• Businesses need to become more software orientated to gain that edge. You need to build your own software or die.
• To stay on top of competitors, you need to innovate. To innovate,...

A company's structure built on teams of around ten people is a way to scale up a company without losing the urgency, focus and quality of talent that characterises a startup by building a large company out of what are essentially many startups.

• "Single-threaded" leaders have only one t...

Make sure your customer feel you're on their side.

Encourage developers to talk directly with customers, listen on a call or attend a meeting with customers regularly to get a human connection with the customer and understand their problems better.

Ask your developers what cus...

• Great product managers are not a layer between customer needs and developers. They actually remove layers, eliminate preconceived solutions and erroneous presumptions, and streamline communications.
• Great product managers facilitate the understanding of customer problems, not only ...

The key to getting business people and developers to work well together, and building a world-class engineering culture, is for the business people to share problems, not solutions, with the developers.

So bringing developers into the big issues you're trying to solve and leveraging their...