Building Teams and Products with Pat Cullen

Pat Cullen, Former SVPE, Carrot Fertility, sat down with me to share his principles and practices for building Teams & Products. At Carrot Fertility, Pat grew the Technology team from 3 employees to over 75, spearheading Engineering, Information Security, Data Privacy, Product, Program Management, and Data functions. Pat used the "Rule of 3" framework to share his learnings across Planning/Roadmapping, Building Engineering teams and cultures, and Ensuring Execution.

• 4:20 Overall approach
  • Start from a place of curiosity and empathy. Understand your stakeholders' needs/points of view.
  • Reflect on your individual beliefs/points of view.
  • As long as you have the right people, there are many different processes that can be adapted to suit the needs of your organization.
• 7:50 Planning/Roadmapping
  • Annual Planning
  • Quarterly Planning
  • Weekly/Bi-weekly Planning
• 12:40 Building Engineering team and culture for first ten/next couple of dozen/scaling to hundreds of members
  • Technical Skills
  • Accountability
  • Team Cultivation/Communication
• 21:08 Ensuring Execution/Processes & Systems
  • Evolution (Resistance->Over-adoption->Enabling too abstractly->Pragmatic middle ground)
  • Minimum Viable Compliance (Weekly, Bi-weekly/Monthly, and Quarterly updates)
  • Flexible Team Dynamics (Daily level)