Jefferson Heard

No-one really likes engineering war stories, but this one's relevant because there's a moral to it.

My dad taught me to read by teaching me to code.

First off, this is gonna be a long article.

So you found an acquisition target, put them through tech diligence, and closed the deal yesterday.

When we talk about accessibility in software we usually talk about screen readers, tab-ordering, alt texts, colors, contrast, and the WCAG standard.

One thing I like to ask in diligence is how people in engineering and product judge the value of third-party software purchases.

The Buffalo River, nestled in the Boston Mountains of Arkansas, is one of the best floats in the country.

There's a problem I see more and more in companies, where Product is thrust into the role of "supervising" Engineering.

I talk often about how modeling data should be done later in the process.

In my previous article, Your SaaS's most important trait is Evolvability I talk about the need to define fitness functions that ladder up to core company metrics like NPS, CSAT, GRR, and COGS.

Avoid, avoid, avoid starting a project by modeling your data in an ORM.

In the world of commercial SaaS, your technology is always on a trajectory to become generic.

So by now you know I'm a software guy.

Communicating technical debt to people other than engineers is essential to getting work on that debt prioritized and valued alongside bugs and product roadmap work, and it’s not easy at all.

I've run the tech side of the M&A playbook now I think 10 times.