Good Engineer, Good PM, Good Salesperson: What I Learned Building a Team to Sixty

I started Solar Labs in the final year of college. By the time we’d grown past sixty people, our closest competitor had announced a Series C and a headcount pushing two hundred. The math was never in our favor. We were outresourced, outhired, and outspent - and we kept growing.

It took me a long time to figure out why.

It wasn’t the product. It wasn’t the timing. It was the way the people in that room operated. Nobody waited to be told. Nobody protected their turf. They argued about feature decisions like the outcome was personal - because for them, it was. Every person on the team behaved like the company’s survival ran through them.

Eventually we wrote it down. The eight cultural metrics we ran at Solar Labs — Delivering WOW, Integrity, Radically Candid, Ownership, Building Long-Term Relationships, Creative, Curious & Open-minded, Drive Measurable Results, Transparency — were never aspirational. They were a description of the people who’d already gotten us this far, with the gaps we wanted to close. They became the operating system underneath everything that follows.

This is what good looks like - across engineering, product, sales, marketing, and customer success - and why trust, not talent, is what lets a small team outrun a better-funded one. Get that right and execution accelerates. Get it wrong, and the best people in the world won’t save you.

Trust Is the Operating System

Most people think of trust as a feeling. It isn’t. It’s an account.

Every commitment kept is a deposit. Every edge case shipped, every deadline blown, every prospect lead lost due to a bug that an engineer could have avoided in time - those are withdrawals. The deposits look trivial in isolation. The account compounds anyway.

I’ve watched engineers stop getting the interesting projects. They never connected it to the six months of half-finished features other teams had to patch around. The CTO noticed. Sales noticed. Slowly, quietly, the best work started flowing to someone else. It wasn’t political. It was physics - work flows to who gets it done. And then the slipping engineers lose their jobs.

This is what Radically Candid meant in practice for us. Kim Scott’s framework was the origin - care personally, then challenge directly - but we built it into the company’s operating values because the alternative is the slow death of unspoken feedback. People can hear hard truths when they know you’re invested in their growth. Skip the personal investment, and the same words land as criticism.

The other seven metrics work the same way. Delivering WOW is what makes a deposit. Integrity is doing what you said you’d do - every commitment kept. Ownership is putting your hand up for the outcome before anyone asks. Drive Measurable Results keeps you honest about whether the work actually moved a number. Transparency protects the trust account from silent erosion. Building Long-Term Relationships recognises that every interaction either compounds the account or burns it. Creative, Curious & Open-minded is what keeps the team contributing outside their swim lane.

These weren’t slogans on a wall. They were a checklist we used in hiring and feedback. The teams that scaled inside Solar Labs weren’t the ones with the most talent on paper. They were the ones where these eight things showed up consistently.

Trust isn’t a soft cultural virtue. It’s the hard infrastructure that lets a sixty-person team outrun a competitor with three times the headcount. When trust is high, decisions get made in a single Slack thread. When it’s low, you drown in committees and coordination meetings. That’s the whole game in startups. Speed. High quality decision making. High quality execution.

Engineering

Two months before our first big enterprise deal closed, we had six engineers and a list of feature requirements that was either going to make us or break us. Tata Power Solar had given us a slate of what they needed in order to adopt the product. Some of it was complex. All of it was non-negotiable. The deal was contingent on shipping - and on shipping clean.

We worked through Saturdays and Sundays for two months. Testing. DevOps. Scaling the platform from 200 customers to 700 in a single migration. Every engineer was thinking through edge cases. Nobody told them to do this. They’d absorbed what was at stake and stretched into it.

The features shipped. The bugs were minor. The deal closed.

That was an inspired team. The kind that, if you read Lencioni’s stages of tribal leadership, sits at level four or five - aligned around shared goals, where collaboration replaces internal competition. You don’t get teams like that by writing values on a wall. You get them by hiring engineers who walk every edge case before they ship - not because they’re paranoid, but because they understand what happens to the trust account when an edge case ships.

A weak engineer codes the happy path. The user refreshes the page, uses a promo code, hits the back button after entering payment - and nothing works the way it did in the demo. The engineer wasn’t thinking about the user. They were thinking about the ticket.

The strong ones think differently. They walk the user journey before they write code. They’ve actually used the product as a customer would, not as a developer would. Customer empathy isn’t a soft skill in engineering. It’s a technical requirement. You can’t build what you don’t feel.

The trust account shows up here too. Every clean release is a deposit with sales, with customer success, with leadership. Every buggy launch that someone else has to apologize for is a withdrawal. Engineers wonder why they stopped getting the hard problems. They never connect it to the trail of half-finished features behind them. Or just not being available when the team really needed them to be. Teams win, not individuals.

The reliable ones become magnetic. Product brings them the ambiguous projects. Leadership trusts them with the unscoped work. The best problems flow toward reliability the way water flows downhill. It’s not politics. It’s physics.

Product

The best product moment I ever watched at Solar Labs didn’t come from the lead PM. It came from a young engineer hire who walked up and said, essentially, “I think I can do this feature better than the way it’s being scoped, and I want to take it on.”

The lead PM was already running it. The hire wasn’t asking permission to help. He was making a case for why he should own it. Then he went and ran his own user interviews, dug into design and stringing, figured out the workflow himself, and shipped something better than what was originally planned.

That’s the CEO-of-the-product mindset. Ownership and Creative, Curious & Open-minded showing up in the same person. It isn’t about title. It’s about the kind of person who can’t sleep when a metric moves the wrong way and treats every decision in their domain like the company’s survival runs through it.

Bad product managers measure themselves by how busy they look. They’re in every standup, every architecture review, every design critique - exhausted, perpetually behind, always reacting. They feel productive because they’re everywhere. Their products aren’t better for it.

Strong PMs do the inverse. They define the problem and the outcome with precision, write a tight brief, and trust the team to figure out the path. They protect their thinking time the way an engineer protects their build environment. They build leverage - competitive battlecards sales can use without looping them in, FAQ docs marketing can cite, briefs engineering can run with - instead of becoming a coordination layer. Product is the most important function by far - everything flows downstream of this function. If what the product team has defined isn’t actually required by the user, nothing else in engineering, marketing or sales really matters.

The harder thing strong PMs do is choose what not to build. Bad PMs let competitors set the roadmap. Every feature gap shows up in the backlog because sales lost a deal to a competitor that had it. Strong PMs walk the team back to the question that actually matters: how many of the last ten lost deals actually mentioned this feature? Almost always, the answer is one or two. Then you stop chasing the competitor and start chasing revenue.

The best PMs also think hard about story. Not the feature list - the feeling. What does the customer say to a colleague over dinner about your product? Get that story right and customers buy without you having to explain. Get it wrong, and you’re the most accurate, most invisible product on the market.

Sales

Sales is where the CEO mindset shows up most cleanly, because the alignment is immediate. If the sales processes isn’t good, the deal doesn’t close. product doesn’t work, the deal doesn’t close. If the deal doesn’t close, the salesperson doesn’t make his variable pay and the company doesn’t make payroll. The salesperson and the company are running the same race.

This is also where I’ve seen the most character at Solar Labs. The salespeople I trusted most - the ones who built the most pipeline over time - were the ones who could look at a prospect and say, honestly, “I don’t think we’re the right fit. You should look at this competitor instead.” Or, “We don’t have a good answer for that. I don’t want to oversell it.”

That’s Integrity doing the heavy lifting. The first time you watch a rep walk away from a deal that would have hit their quarterly number because the fit wasn’t there, you understand the long game. The customer remembers. The next time they have a project where the fit is right, they call back. The rep who passed honestly closes a bigger deal eighteen months later because the trust was already built. That’s Building Long-Term Relationships in operation - not a slogan, a pattern.

Bad salespeople treat every prospect like a target on a dartboard. They sling half-baked deals that become long-term churn. They sell features that don’t exist and disappear the moment the contract is signed. You can always tell when you’re being sold by one of them - they ask two discovery questions, then jump to the demo. They don’t want to understand your problem. They want to advance the stage.

Good salespeople run their territory like their own startup. They know the decision-makers at their top accounts, time outreach to quarterly earnings cycles, and show up with a written recovery plan when a deal slips. They get into the weeds - at Solar Labs, our best sellers were involved in product feedback, ran their own QA on edge cases that mattered to prospects, and pushed engineering on roadmap calls. That earned them trust in both directions. Engineering didn’t see them as a feature factory. They saw someone who’d spent the time to understand what was actually possible. It made engineers feel what they were working on, mattered to someone.

Marketing

Marketing is the function where the temptation to optimize for appearances can be the strongest. Metrics can be gamed. Campaigns can be prettied up. A calendar of busywork can fill any week. The marketers who break out of that trap are the ones who refuse to be measured by their own department’s vanity numbers.

The marketing call I remember most clearly at Solar Labs came from someone whose KPI was MQL volume. They didn’t trust it. They kept asking - and eventually demanding - the data that connected MQL to SQL to Sales-Accepted Opportunity to Trial to Closed Won. They wanted to see the whole funnel, not just the part they owned. Eventually they built their own end-to-end report.

That’s a marketer who cares about the net impact on revenue they are actually having, not their own metric. The MQL number is meaningless if the leads don’t convert downstream. The marketer who insists on seeing the full funnel - who forces sales to share data they’d rather not share - is Drive Measurable Results in action. They’re not optimizing for the scoreboard their department shows. They’re optimizing for the scoreboard the company runs on.

The bad version is the marketer obsessed with the social media post that got a thousand likes from people who will never buy. Or the swag order that made the team feel good at a conference. Or the campaign that hit MQL targets but produced unqualified leads. They’re not bad people. They’re optimizing for the wrong scoreboard.

There’s a line attributed to John Chambers from his Cisco days that I’ve held onto: “I don’t confuse hard work with results.” That’s the cleanest framing of marketing I’ve heard. You can be busy from sunup to sundown - inbox zero, back-to-back meetings, every Slack DM answered - and produce almost no value for the business. The good marketers might look like they’re doing less because they’re doing the right things: thinking, planning, measuring, and saying no to the noise.

When conflict shows up - and in resource-constrained startups it always does - the good marketer’s priority is unmistakable. Company first. Department second. Self third. Always.

Customer Success

Customer success is where everything everyone else built either pays dividends or gets called due. Engineering’s reliability, sales’s honesty, product’s roadmap - they all converge in the relationship the CS person runs with the customer over time.

The CS team I trusted most at Solar Labs operated like product managers for the customer. They had monthly calls with their accounts - what’s going well, what’s not, what’s at risk. But the move that sticks with me is the one nobody asked them to make. They built their own dashboard. It surfaced customers who weren’t doing solar designs in the software — the leading indicator that an account was about to churn. If they spotted a customer drifting, they reached out before the customer had even decided to leave.

If that dashboard ever broke, hell broke loose, and engineering would drop everything to fix it. That tells you the system was load-bearing in a way the org chart didn’t capture. The CS team had built the early-warning system the company actually ran on.

(Today, AI can do most of that monitoring automatically. Back then, it was a person with a SQL query and a refusal to wait for someone else to flag the problem. Ownership doesn’t always look heroic - sometimes it’s ‘just’ a dashboard.)

Good CS knows their customer’s exact usage, their workflows, who the champion is, who the actual signer is, and what value they’re getting - down to specific metrics. That intimacy changes every conversation. The customer doesn’t have to explain themselves for the tenth time. The CS person is already inside their world.

Bad CS treats every interaction as a ticket to close. World-class at closing tickets, terrible at retaining customers. The two are not the same thing.

The ownership gap is most visible in timing. Good CS sees a churn risk four to five months out. They notice usage drops. They pick up on stakeholder changes. They hear the subtle shift on a call when the champion stops saying “we” and starts saying “the team.” They flag it before the customer has decided. Bad CS is surprised when the cancellation email arrives. They scramble. They beg. By then, the customer made up their mind weeks ago.

Renewal is to CS what closing is to sales. There are no excuses for not renewing. None. Not pricing. Not product gaps. Not competitive pressure. Maybe all of those are real, and none of them are absolution. The CEO of a company doesn’t get to blame market conditions when the business fails. Neither does the CEO of a customer relationship.

The Foxhole Test

After six years of building Solar Labs and watching every kind of person cycle through the team, I’ve stopped over-engineering interview scorecards. I’ve stopped weighting pedigree and polish. I now ask one question of every person I consider hiring:

Would I want this person in a foxhole with me when we’re outmatched a hundred to one?

Did they have my back when it mattered to me, and when it really mattered to the company?

That’s the only interview question that matters. Everything else is commentary.

You’re not just outmatched as a startup. You’re outmatched absurdly. The only thing you control is how the people in your corner show up every day - whether they treat their patch (engineering, product, sales, marketing, customer success) like a job they’re passing through, or like a company they’re personally responsible for keeping alive.

Good people in every role share the same operating system. Ownership. Trust. Radical candor. The refusal to be the reason something failed. Whatever you put on the wall, those are the ones that have to be true underneath.

Find them. Pay them well. Align them. Trust them. Let them argue. And most importantly, get out of their way.