Octus Leadership & Management

What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced?

I don’t believe you can lead people in doing something unless you’re actually doing it with them.

This isn’t about being the best engineer in the room. It’s about sitting next to someone, working through the same problem they’re wrestling with, and building real understanding from that shared experience. That’s where actual empathy comes from. And that’s what creates the kind of connection between people that drives real growth and results you can’t manufacture any other way.So, I show up. I pair-program with engineers across the team. I jump into code reviews and releases. I’m in the weeds with support tickets and incident management, not just to make sure we’re handling things professionally and quickly, but to see where our tools or processes are making people’s jobs harder than they need to be.

If I’m asking the team to do it, I need to understand what it actually feels like to do it. Otherwise I’m just managing from a spreadsheet, and nobody benefits from that.

Which forum or ritual keeps priorities and expectations clear?

Every week, the entire application development team gets together for our AppDev All-Hands. I kick things off with about 15 minutes of real talk about what’s happening at the leadership level. What are they actually worried about? What’s coming down the pike? Where does our work fit into that bigger picture? I’m always honest when things are still fluid, because they usually are, but I try to give people a sense of what the next few weeks or months might look like for us.

After that, we hand it over to whoever was on call the previous week. They walk everyone through what broke, what almost broke and what we learned. It sounds simple, but it’s how we spot patterns before they become real problems. The whole team gets visibility into what’s actually happening across our systems.

This is also where myself and the other senior team members jump in with questions. Not “gotcha questions,” just the ones that push us to be 10 percent better than we were last week. We know we’re capable of it.

We wrap up with a victory lap. Managers and engineers share what shipped, what got fixed and what we’re proud of from the week. It’s a good reminder that even when things are chaotic, we’re still moving forward.

What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?

The thing that really gets everyone fired up here? When a customer has a rough experience, and we can actually do something about it.

Sure, we’re always working on big strategic initiatives that push us to think bigger. But there’s something different about jumping into a quick huddle with the sales and support teams to fix something that’s actively frustrating someone. That’s when you feel the energy shift. People move faster, get more creative, and drop the usual meeting formalities.

And it’s working. Our net promoter score has grown double digits every year for the past three years. Even more telling: We’ve doubled the number of people using our product for those critical first five-, 10- and 30-minute sessions year over year, which means people are actually sticking around and engaging, not just signing up and bouncing.