Company values matter. I mean really matter. As in billions of dollars and creating new industries. Most people say they matter, but I'm not sure everyone really believes that values are transformational in their significance. I learned this first hand. My first job after college was at PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft had a strong core value around their…

Every great technology company starts with a great product. When you first start the hard work of turning your vision into living, breathing code, you have critical decisions to make about your foundation. It is critical to “build your house on a rock." In years past the decisions were desktop or web app? Oracle or SQL Server? Unix or NT? Now the…

I've interviewed over 300 folks in the last 2 years while building the Okta team. Most have been product development folks. One topic that often comes up is Agile development. As in "do you guys do Agile?", or "at company xyz we exclusively practiced Agile". Few terms in interview land are more overloaded than "Agile". Whenever a candidate has …