Various Companies

I work with CEOs and CTOs of growing SaaS companies to enable their engineering departments to generate more business value. These are some common problems I can help you solve:

🤦‍♂️ Our engineering department doubled in size, but productivity hit a brick wall!
🤷‍♂️ We’re totally dependent on the agency that developed our MVP!
🤑 Engineering is a Cost Centre instead of a Profit Centre!
🙏 Engineering Management Guidance Needed

Hire me as your CTO in a fractional capacity, or to troubleshoot a specific problem.

CTO | Engineering Management & Scaling Troubleshooter

Logiq Labs

✅ Managed 120 people (~90 engineers and product managers), across multiple sites internationally. 
✅ Led development of a FinTech B2B2C SaaS asset trading platform and scaled it to handle $180+ billion in annual trading volume.
✅ Led deployment and scaling of internally developed Marketing Automation platform (B2B2C SaaS) to successfully handle 9 million monthly unique visitors.
✅ Doubled the size of product & engineering department; led organisational transformation through mergers, spinoffs and implementation of Agile methodology. Member of executive management team. VP Engineering and VP Product reported to me.
✅ Managed comprehensive re-architecting, rewrite and successful deployment of internally developed B2B2C payments processing solution.

Chief Technology Officer

Responsible for engineering department of 40 people.

Director of Research & Development

Morpheus Games

✔ Set up the company's engineering department and grew it to 13 members, in Israel and Kyiv, Ukraine.
✔ Worked with my teams to deliver the company's lottery tickets and betting e-commerce platform, and first B2C product, within 8 months (industry typical: 1 year).
✔ Provided technical and managerial oversight (and mentoring where required), and guided architectural decisions.
✔ Established standard and consistent processes for recruiting, evaluating employee performance, designing new functionality, managing the software development life-cycle (SDLC), controlling technical debt, deploying code, handling and resolving production issues.
✔ Invested heavily in automating every step of the development, testing and deployment pipeline (JIRA, GitHub, Jenkins, Docker, AWS EC2 and ECS) to support CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment).
✔ My department successfully passed multiple audits mandated by relevant governmental regulatory and standards bodies, based on the ISO 27001 information security standard. These examined both our internal engineering methodologies, processes and information systems, as well as the security of the deployed product, including undergoing (and surviving) penetration testing. These efforts also contributed greatly to being able to achieve PCI/DSS compliance.

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Jargon for keyword bingo players: Angular 5, Amazon Web Services, Node.js, microservices, using AWS SNS/SQS as an event bus, ELK (Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana) for logging and monitoring, Agile.

Director of R&D

Snappers.tv

Finalist - 4YFN competition at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona 2016

http://www.snappers.tv

Independent Consultant

✔ Development of web apps (Google Closure Library/Compiler, AngularJS, Bootstrap) including backends (Google AppEngine (Python), Node.js, Firebase, PHP, Heroku, Amazon EC2 & various cloud services) and even Outlook Add-ins (VB).
✔ Worked with a long term client on a concept that challenged conventional assumptions, and iterated it until it was mature enough and successful enough to be mainstreamed into production at the client's IT department.
✔ Work remotely, coordinating and collaborating with client teams.
✔ Experience with analytics and multivariate testing to increase conversions.
✔ Experience with spreadsheet & visualization techniques to support data driven decisions, for both engineering decisions and determining business goals.
✔ Worked with lawyers / corporate counsel to minimize client risk exposure, ensure compliance with relevant regulations, and to compose EULAs.

Technology & Product Management Advisor / Full Stack Developer

Claritude Software

Claritude Software's mission is to help busy people overcome email overload and increase their productivity. Our first product is SpeedFiler, a powerful add-in for Microsoft Outlook that makes it extremely easy to file incoming and outgoing email. SpeedFiler's super-fast, find-as-you-type folder selection window makes filing almost effortless, even if you have a deep hierarchy of hundreds of folders. When you send a message, SpeedFiler can prompt you to select a folder in which to file it, so you don't have to dump it in Sent Items. Supports Outlook 2003 and 2007. Ideal for busy people with full inboxes.

✔ Identified the problem and corresponding market niche and devised a product (SpeedFiler) with a simple, streamlined UX/UI that masked complexities of the solution.
✔ Sold multiple enterprise licences (1000+ seats) and tens of thousands of small business licenses.
✔ Developed partnerships with industry-specific enterprise resellers.
✔ Set up website; wrote sales and suppport content; integrated with credit card / invoice processing system; used web analytics and multivariate testing to improve conversions.
✔ Set up a blog to help market the product by becoming recognized as a thought leader in the relevant space. This led to quotes in other blogs, print magazines, radio shows and even a book!
✔ Worked with outsourced contractors to produce various components.

Founder & CEO

Finjan

Finjan Software (www.finjan.com), since acquired by Trustwave (www.trustwave.com), is a leading provider of proactive secure content management solutions for global enterprises, protecting over 4 million enterprise users from existing and future Internet threats.

✔ Member of executive team, reported to CEO 
✔ Initiated product management function; recruited and nurtured a cohesive team of 3 product managers and 2 technical writers
✔ Led migration of product portfolio from software to appliances; developed vision and requirements for an innovative next-generation product line and supervised its successful execution
✔ Acted as catalyst for development of revolutionary technology for the new generation product line
✔ Overall strategic and tactical responsibility for 9 products
✔ Active participant in strategic sales efforts to global corporations (including multiple successful deals of over 100,000 seats/$3M each) and in OEM and technology partner relationships
✔ Spokesman for press interviews, webinars, etc.

VP Product Management

Alchemedia

Alchemedia Technologies developed enterprise security products that prevent information theft by trusted insiders - today's costliest information security problem.

After leaving Alchemedia, I participated in the design review for Microsoft Windows Rights Management platform in Redmond. Microsoft has recently (2005) licensed Alchemedia's technology for use in their security products.

✔ Joined as Senior Product Manager; promoted to Director; reported to VP Marketing
✔ Initiated product management function at the company; built, trained, managed and mentored a team of 3 product managers and 2 technical writers
✔ Overall tactical responsibility for the product line; feature roadmaps, functional specifications, delivery schedules and marshalling products through Engineering and QA; technical white papers
✔ Cooperated with partners on integrated products 
✔ Held pre/post-sale contacts with global corporations; participated in sales/business development activities.

Director of Product Management

Better On-line Solutions

Better On-line Solutions (www.bosweb.com, NASDAQ: BOSC) develops Voice-over-IP Telephony solutions and networking products for personal and IBM mid-range computers.
 
✔ Managed an e-commerce development product for IBM platforms, developed in cooperation with IBM.
✔ Responsible for technical relationship with IBM; coordinated development with senior IBM staff, including the chief security architect and managers of the HTTP and FTP server products. 
✔ Defined the functional specifications, designed the system architecture, object model and user interface. 
✔ Represented company at trade shows; delivered lectures and presentations at distributor and customer conferences. 
✔ Interviewed and hired prospective team-member candidates.

Product Manager / Team Leader

Bashan Systems

Bashan was an IT consulting firm, serving the industrial and governmental sectors in Israel. It is now part of Matrix (www.matrix-it.co.il).

✔ Managed development activities at a contract site, consisting of three software development teams of up to five members each
✔ Analyzed, designed and led development of various systems, including a distributed international financial management and accounting system to oversee an annual budget of over $10 million worldwide
✔ Organized training sessions for end-users
✔ Formulated software development procedures during the companys ISO 9000 certification process

R&D Team Leader / Systems Analyst

Engineering Management Expert • Fractional CTO • Remote • 🇮🇱

I help growing SaaS companies overcome engineering management challenges and technical roadblocks, in order to scale business outcomes up to the next level. Hire me as your CTO in a fractional capacity, or to troubleshoot a specific problem.

More details → itzysabo.com

I'm a product and engineering executive leader and manager, having alternated between Product and Engineering for much of my career.

As a business oriented software CTO and executive leader, I have experience across a broad range of industries (cyber, fintech, gaming, productivity), business models (B2B, B2C, B2B2C SaaS) and company growth stages.

I help CEOs, CTOs, Engineering VPs, Engineering Managers and teams deliver more business value in less time, by working with them to identify and solve systemic problems that are holding them back, and to align engineering with the company's business goals.

I have built engineering organisations from scratch, managed departments up to 120 people in size, and learnt how to execute hypergrowth, mergers, acquisitions and spinoffs, as well as reorganisations and downsizing.

I have also successfully prepared organisations for audits, certification and licensing in regulated industries.

I am highly analytical, organised and systematic. 
My superpowers include:
- Sharpened problem-solving instincts.
- Leading and managing teams remotely.
- Hiring trustworthy people, then trusting them.
- Proceeding with confidence through labyrinths of uncertainty.
- Communicating effectively with people at all levels of an organisation.
- Seeing the bigger picture, but able to dive into details where necessary.

The CEO said: "We need a native mobile app."
The software engineer heard:

“Build me:
- An iOS app, written in Swift;
- An Android app, written in Kotlin;
... and keep maintaining the web-based version of our app that is hosted on our website.”

This probable miscommunication is underpinned by a fundamental misconception.

Today's issue of my free CTO Logic newsletter explains:

💡 Whether your app should be native or not is also a BUSINESS decision!

💡 Why web apps ARE native apps.

💡 The capabilities of Progressive Web Apps (PWA).

💡 How to hedge your bets by adding a native wrapper to your PWA.

💡 How PWAs were the OFFICIAL way to deploy apps to the original iPhone. Watch Steve Jobs make a strong sales pitch for web apps that is even more valid today.

💡 Why Apple made a U-turn on that decision, why Google followed suit, and how the app store model is steadily weakening.

💡 The 4 major business risks you assume when you delegate your distribution and revenue to the app store ecosystem.

💡 What the best app store is.

🟢 Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eiihcTtr

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Work with me if:
→ You’re a SaaS company, with <100 engineers, and
→ You have growing pains, productivity issues, or
→ You’ve hit scalability limits.

🤙 Book a call with Itzchak Sabo

Itzchak Sabo

"We had a thundering herd problem, so we added jitter."
— Overheard at the software engineering water-cooler.

It's a rather amusing sentence when taken out of context. 

But to software engineers it makes perfect sense. 
It's also easy to explain to muggles.
And it's ironic, too.

Familiar story:

Hundreds of people are crowding around a shop doorway just before it opens for a sale. An employee walks up to the door from the inside, and unlocks it. 

What happens next is known as the "thundering herd" problem.

Lots of people; a narrow entrance. If I were that employee, I'd want to figure out how not to get trampled. And how to prevent anyone else getting trampled, too. And to prevent the door from being uprooted from its hinges.

The first step of the solution is to have a loudspeaker outside, playing a recorded message saying "Back Off! Take a ticket from the machine!" 

If you don't have a ticket already, the machine gives you one that says "Come back in 1 minute." If you come back in 1 minute, but the area is still blocked, the machine eats your ticket and exchanges it for a new one that says "Come back in 2 minutes." The next ticket will be for 4 minutes, then 8, 16, and so on. 

Basically, the intervals keep doubling until you give up or get in. 

That's usually a fine solution for when people arrive at the shop at random times to start with. But when everyone is waiting for the same singular event — for the shop to open up — apart from the lucky few who get in when the door opens, all the rest will get a ticket to come back in 1 minute.  

If everyone turns up *exactly* when their ticket says, people will again be at risk of getting trampled.

The solution is to make the ticket machine a bit jittery — imagine that its machinery is a bit jumpy or shaky when setting the time you're supposed to return. Instead of telling you to come back in 1, 2, 4 or 8 minutes exactly, it will tell you to come back in that same number of minutes, plus/minus a random number of seconds.

This "jitter" smoothes the flow of people returning to the shop, and greatly reduces the number of people jostling to get in at exactly the same moment. Also, fewer people need to be told to back off each time.

This is exactly what happens when a server or process goes offline. As soon as it comes back up, it can get swamped with a thundering herd of requests that can take it down again. The thundering herd can be so large, that even backing off for exponential intervals won't help — you'll need to add jitter. 

So what's the irony? 

The irony here is that a bit of jitter can actually smooth things out.

- - - - -
Work with me if:
→ You’re a SaaS company, with <100 engineers, and
→ You have growing pains, productivity issues, or
→ You’ve hit scalability limits.

🤙 Book a call with Itzchak Sabo

I lost my internet connection while posting a comment.
This failure reminded me of one DO and one DON'T.

I had invested several minutes in writing and editing it a most amazing and insightful comment (IMHO).

I was so proud of it, that I might later have turned it into a stand-alone post.

But it was not to be. My internet connection dropped after I pressed Enter, leaving me staring at a progress spinner.

Once I realised my connection was down, what could I have expected?

→ To be presented with my comment, possibly in editable form, and possibly with an error message, so that I could try again to press the Post button.

But nope! I just got an error message. My well-crafted comment had evaporated.

Do:
- Design a reasonable experience for recovering from foreseeable errors. 

This requires some common-sense risk evaluation. What's the risk here?

The "risk" is that my comment might actually be posted successfully, but without the front-end receiving confirmation of that. In the worst case, I might repost the comment, thus creating a duplicate! 😱

Don't:
- Let engineers write error messages, especially in bad English.

From the above evidence, I strongly suspect this case bypassed product management altogether.

Come on LinkedIn — I know you can do better than this.

- - - - -
Work with me if:
→ You’re a SaaS company, with <100 engineers, and
→ You have growing pains, productivity issues, or
→ You’ve hit scalability limits.

🤙 Book a call with Itzchak Sabo


How to upset a client: do exactly what they ask.
Maybe it's a personality flaw, but I just can't do that.

Client: "I want X."
Me: "Actually, what you need is Y."

OK, between those 2 steps is a voyage of discovery. The point is that I don't take the client at face value. We need to dig deep.

Customers know what they want.
But often, they cannot express what they NEED. 
They aren't even aware that they can't do this.

They don't usually tell you their problem. 
Instead, they tell you what they think the solution is. 
(If it's an app, they've already fallen in love with it. ❤️)

Clients typically match at least 2 of these categories, and understandably so:
1. Not used to analysing problems rigorously.
2. Have difficulty articulating the problem precisely.
3. Unfamiliar with technological concepts, approaches and tools.

Whenever a customer asks me to do something specific, I always need to know what problem they are trying to solve. 

We have a conversation about their "opening solution," and I try to tease out of them what the problem actually is:

1. So I do <the thing>. What will happen next?
This is especially telling. It's a method of eliciting their vision of desired results. In turn, it may lead to an articulation of the current problem.

2. Who experiences the problem?
3. Who suffers from the problem?
The person who witnesses the symptoms is not necessarily the person who owns the problematic results, but both viewpoints can shed light on it.

4. Why is it a problem?
When this one works, which is not often, it's worth a LOT. Sometimes we discover that they're thinking too squarely and the problem isn't actually a problem; something else is the problem.

We visualise their desired BUSINESS OUTCOME, rather than discuss their required TECHNICAL OUTPUT.

Once we have discovered the root of the matter, I then ensure that I can articulate the problem clearly, to the customer's satisfaction.

Only now can we begin to figure out possible solutions. 

The solution often ends up being quite different from what was originally requested. Ether that, or more degrees of freedom and creativity can be applied to solving the problem.

P.S. 
How is the photo related to all this?

-----
Work with me if:
→ You’re a SaaS company, with <100 engineers, and
→ You have growing pains, productivity issues, or
→ You’ve hit scalability limits.

🤙 Book a call with Itzchak Sabo

The email Subject field is ineptly named.
It should be called Summary, and written LAST.
(Personally, I'd call it TL;DR)

Use the Subject field more effectively to simultaneously:

1. Get your message across.
2. Get the recipient's attention.
3. Show consideration for the recipient's time.

This is how I do it:

1. Craft your subject line to be a super-brief SUMMARY of the bottom-line of your message rather than a descriptive title. 

2. Make it more specific, to distinguish it from similar items in your recipient's inbox, and to give it as much context as you can.

3. If you can, include a verb in command form. Or ask a question. If you want the recipient to act, tell them how!

4. When replying to a badly named thread, change the subject!

Examples:

❌ Draft Agreement
✅ DEF Ltd. / Draft Agreement - please edit or comment

❌ Trip Expenses
✅ ABC conference / trip expenses - please approve

❌ Alice Smith's CV
✅ Alice Smith's CV looks good: invite for interview  

❌ Proposal
✅ Proposal to reduce costs - what is next step?
 
❌ Bob / Itzy Meeting
✅ Glad to have met you; let's stay in touch

❌ PQR feature
✅ PQR feature - expected delivery date? 

❌ Jack Bloggs - Reference
✅ Jack Bloggs - highly recommended! 

❌ Jill / Itzy Meeting
✅ Thank you for your helpful advice!

❌ Decision on XYZ Project
✅ XYZ Project - It's approved!

When your recipient takes a quick peek and scans their inbox, they'll know what you want at a glance. 

P.S.
What good (or terrible) email subject lines have you seen?

P.P.S.
What email-related pet peeves do you have?

-----
Algorithm:
📈 Grow your software engineering team.
⛔️ Hit inevitable process & tech roadblocks.
🤙 Call me to help you overcome & speed up again.

You feel redundant, almost a freeloader, when the people you manage, manage too well without you.

The first time this happened to me, the rational part of me decided to call it a success.

I was now less involved in routine matters, and could concentrate more deeply on strategy.

I had moved my focus from doing things right, to doing the right things.

- - - - -
Work with me if:
→ You’re a SaaS company, with <100 engineers, and
→ You have growing pains, productivity issues, or
→ You’ve hit scalability limits.

🤙 Book a call with Itzchak Sabo

We're so convinced of this lie — we could fool a polygraph:

"I make rational decisions." 

Nope.

💡 Our decisions are dictated by *emotions*. The rationale comes *afterwards*.

👉 When designing a product, feature or screen, take a few minutes to analyse and describe explicitly:

1. How does the customer *feel* about the problem you are solving?
2. What *emotion* drove the customer to this point? 
3. How do you want to make them *feel*?

For example, a team I worked with was building a product that aimed to teach people how to invest wisely in stocks.

Expected feelings: FEAR, but also the desire to overcome it.
"This is too complicated and difficult for me. I can't do it."

We wanted to evoke feelings of CONFIDENCE and DETERMINATION.
"It's not as complicated as it seems. With the right education, guidance and tools, I can take charge of my financial future."

Taking this seriously will have a significant effect on the user interface and user experience that you present to your customers.

- - - - -
Work with me if:
→ You’re a SaaS company, with <100 engineers, and
→ You have growing pains, productivity issues, or
→ You’ve hit scalability limits.

🤙 Book a call with Itzchak Sabo

I have a zillion browser tabs open. 
Across 6 browser windows. Using several Chrome profiles.

I thought I was the crazy one, but an increasing number of people I meet admit to having the same  ̶p̶̶r̶̶o̶̶b̶̶l̶̶e̶̶m̶̶ ̶ usage profile.

Digital clean-up seems to have become a chore of chores — fraught with decision overload and procrastination.

How often do you declare bankruptcy and clean your slate?

Taplio

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