Category: Team

Moz Team

Weaponized Humor

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There’s a constant fight raging at Moz, and every other scaling startup I’ve seen. On one side are the forces of corporateness – trying to make the workplace a more stodgy, inauthentic, TPS-reports-to-be-filed place. On the other are the defenders of humanity and authenticity – the people who built the company and are, by and large, doing their best to…
Hiring Marketing Moz Team

Why Every Company Should Have a Marketing-Focused Webdev Team

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Ask any marketing consultant focused on inbound channels (SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, email, etc.) what the most challenging part of their job is and 75%+ will say: “working with the engineering team.” This should come as no surprise. Engineering and webdev resources are, along with web marketers, the biggest scarcest and hardest to hire for web-based businesses. We…
Hiring Moz Startups Team

Some Thoughts on Firing Employees

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This past week, I read a terrific Quora thread on firing. The depth and breadth of answers shows the wide range of opinions and practices on the subject, and it made me think about the topic for this blog. Companies are rarely transparent about how and why they let people go, so hopefully we can be an exception here, at…
Hiring Startups Team

When Brilliant Minds Become Brilliant Jerks

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The NYTimes Bits Blog has a worthwhile read from last week entitled “What Do You Do With the Brilliant Jerks?” I’d encourage startup founders and team members to take 8 minutes and read it thoroughly. On its face, the article didn’t strike me as especially controversial, but the comments(and some of the responses on social media) tell a different story.…
Hiring Team

Interview Questions and Interview Strategy

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s struck me of late that many smart companies with reputations for giving tough interviews are weirdly anti-strategic in their approach to interview questions. Chatting with folks from across our organization (and a few others) who’ve done their fair share of interviewing with Google, Amazon, Boeing, the US State Department, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’m struck by what seems like a…
Startups Team

It’s Not Just Technical Debt; Everything Gets Painful & Slow as You Scale

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
A tremendous amount gets written about technical debt (definition) in the startup ecosystem. As you scale your product and engineering, you inevitably make sacrifices for the sake of speed that lead to pain down the road. What startups (and people who interact with them) don’t often realize is that this same problem happens across nearly every team and every form…

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