Author: Jeff Francis

When you’re an early-stage software startup, making your first in-house hire can feel like a pivotal moment… because it is one! We get this question allll the time: “Help! Who should my first in-house hire be?! And that’s for good reason; there’s a lot on the line — product vision,... Read More

If you lead engineering or software development within your enterprise, you know that you walk a shaky tightrope between maintaining your existing systems and pushing forward with new innovations. Balancing technical debt and new feature development is no easy feat — sure, you have to service technical debt, but you... Read More

We’re doing something a little different this month. Instead of a normal ENO8 Answers webinar + video, we wanted to switch it up and interview someone with decades of experience building and launching software startups who could speak to all things founder’s journey.  I met Brenda Stoner about a decade... Read More

I wish the news coming out of startup-land were better, but unless you’ve pivoted to A.I. in some way, funding is tighter, budgets are shrinking, layoffs are in the news every other week, job searches are taking forever… it’s grim. (Not to mention the fact that too many of those... Read More

It’s the boring stuff that makes or breaks businesses. Maintenance? Boring. Daily stand up? Boring. Data scrubbing? Boring. But if you’re not doing those things well and often, your product can crumble. We all love to focus on inventions and new features because they’re fun, capture our imaginations and can... Read More

We’ve built hundreds of innovative digital products over the last decade. With that experience comes some trends — you start to notice signals for success. One of the biggest signals we see in product development success is on the staffing front. We’ve identified three mission-critical roles and what it takes... Read More

“How do we become more innovative” — it’s a question we’re asked by clients, friends, collaborators, you name it. People know they need to innovate to keep their companies competitive, but they’re not sure what steps they should be taking to get there. It’s 2 million steps… but not in... Read More

Innovation and risk go hand in hand. Whenever you’re innovating (or trying to), you’re by definition trying to change something about the way you do business. Whether it’s changing a process, expanding into a new market, whatever, you’re taking a risk. The risk could be time, it could be money,... Read More

I’ve been helping companies build digital products for well over a decade. I wouldn’t venture so far as to say “I’ve seen it all” … but I’ve seen a lot. I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way (most of those mistakes are out of the way by now, but... Read More

As we wrap up November, we’re also getting toward the end of budget-planning season. (I know not every company works on a calendar fiscal year, but for a lot of us, Oct./Nov. is when we plan out budget allocations for the next fiscal year). We’re sorting out what we want... Read More