| This has been our approach as we scaled from customer one to acquisition by bigco a decade later, and I'd still point to it as being a key driver of our success: - Set a monthly meeting with a co-worker from each functional area (e.g. finance, support, sales). The meeting should be run by whomever has the best horizontal view of needs across the business, along with whoever is running point on development to clarify things. - Go around the room and ask the question, "What's one thing (report/tool/insight/data/etc) that would make your job easier?" - Track those requests on a shared document or board, giving stakeholders an opportunity to reprioritize their list (should never be more than a "top 3") each meeting - PUNCHLINE: Commit to addressing one item from each department's top 3 every quarter. We did this starting early with engineer #2, but if you can't devote a FTE, divide and conquer among your current team. 10+ years later we have dozens of internal tools that have automated so much of what I see bigco still addressing by throwing people at it. It's never too late to start and it's a great way to build a love affair between your non-technical departments and developers! |