Scaleup Leaders: Stories from Experience

This week, I’m joined by Egil Østhus — co-founder and CEO of Unleash, an open-source feature management platform used by teams at Wayfair, T-Mobile, Allianz, and more. Before launching Unleash, Egil led engineering at Visma, a 6,000+ developer SaaS giant. He’s seen both the slow grind of corporate transformation and the chaos of building from scratch — and in this conversation, we talk about what...

What do you do when you’re suddenly in charge… and totally unprepared? In this episode, I speak with Gillian Davis , leadership strategist and founder of Overtime Leader , who’s spent the last decade helping scaleups grow their leadership and culture as they move from scrappy startup to mature company. Gillian’s journey started with crisis: she took over her family’s business when her father fell...

What happens when you go from designing or building things yourself… to leading a team of 100+? And what if your career didn’t follow the standard product ladder to get there? In this candid and funny conversation, Lidia Oshlyansky shares her journey from social worker to backend engineer to product and UX leader at companies like Google, Spotify, and fast-moving startups. We explore the invisible...

We often think great leadership is about having all the answers and staying composed under pressure. But what if the real key to leading a high-performing team is being open about your mistakes? In this episode, Kim Wylie reflects on two decades of leadership experience at Google, Farfetch, and scale-ups—sharing what actually builds trust and performance when you’re stepping into a new team. We ta...

From Google to high-growth scaleups to the boardroom , Maya Moufarek has spent 20+ years helping founders scale their businesses. As the founding CMO of Pharmacy2U , she helped grow the UK’s largest online pharmacy to a scale equivalent to opening a new pharmacy every 2.5 days. Today, she’s a fractional CMO, board member, and angel investor , helping startups build scalable, profitable growth engi...

Being a scaleup leader can feel like herding cats. - You’re growing, that’s great. - But your growth brings problems. - You have more people but they get less done. - Autonomy used to work, now there is misalignment. - People get in each other’s way and slow things down. Is the solution less autonomy? Or is that too restrictive? Cliff Hazell has the answer. Cliff worked with Spotify to grow from 7...

Christian Meinerding is the Co-Founder and CEO of HiveMQ, a company he founded 11 years ago. He told me about his experience growing a business from scratch, raising a €40 million series A for a total of €50 million raised and growing the team to almost 200 people. When Christian started out, his process of using OKRs was simple and straightforward. However, as his company grew, they started to no...

This week I'm joined by Marc Sniukas. Marc is a strategy advisor and he helps CEOs and leadership teams design and execute better strategy. We discuss why strategy can become a big complex monster and how to prevent that. And Marc reveals the three simple steps of strategy - understanding the context, making decisions, and taking action - and how you can use these to steps to creat your own better...

Team meetings feeling lacklustre and unproductive? Do they often turn into lengthy sessions of updates that leave everyone feeling bored and frustrated? The problem is most likely that you're using a people-driven approach in your meetings. They typically mean: Roundtable updates People bored and not engaged No focus on plans and problem solving. In this episode, I explain how you can use an Agend...

Zoltan Vardy is a startup mentor who helps B2B tech founders struggling with sales to sell and market to enterprise clients. We had a great discussion about: Not adapting for every client to actually help them make a choice. Choosing your battles Goal setting for sales when you don't have any idea what a realistic number would be Shiny object syndrome ...and a few more things besides. If you enjoy...

Many of my clients have had a bad experience of OKRs before working with me. And I noticed that the reasons they had been failing were the same. So I dug out all my past client notes, went through them meticulously gathering the most common mistakes, and finally complied this hit list of the Top 10 Tips to make sure you implement your OKRs right. Want insider access to expert tips and strategies l...

What remote working teams lack is remote collaboration - a place where people informally put forward ideas, get input, rework them, agree, disagree and come to an agreement! To create this, we need a fresh approach - something other than Zoom meetings. Online meetings are formal and agenda driven - they don’t lend themselves to the informality of problem solving discussions. And that's where the S...

Unless you plan HOW you’re going to execute on your OKRs after you’ve set them, you probably won’t achieve them. But this is where I see a lot of my clients stumbling and making one of these mistakes: They set OKRs and think they’re done. Setting and forgetting is like buying that online course, watching all the videos… …and doing nothing. 2. They write a monster 20-page plan. You want feedback an...

It seems logical. You've got company level OKRs and team OKRs, so it would make sense to have individual OKRs, right? Wrong. Because... They undermine the benefit of cross-functional alignment you get from company and team OKRs. Managers are tempted to use individual OKRs as a performance measurement tool. Too many OKRs means you don’t focus on what you need to do and the trade offs you need to ma...

Too often a business strategy consists only of 6 or 7 strategic pillars. So when it comes to writing OKRs, people have difficulty. Why? Because pillars don't tell you what to do next. They don't help you work out what the steps are to achieve your goals. To do this you need a strategy that has a narrative - a story. In this episode of Scaleup Leaders, I'll tell you exactly what this means, why it'...

Nick Burne is on a mission to help nonprofits large and small grow their fundraising on social platforms with his company, GivePanel. Nick started GivePanel in 2019 with one employee. Fast forward to 2023 and he now employees 30 people across 5 countries. Join me as I chat to Nick about his incredible journey, and discover the Highs and Lows he has experienced building his business and being the C...

Nikos Kryvossidis is the best manager I never had  (he was my boss’s boss at Google, so not technically my manager) He had a knack for inspiring great loyalty among his team …protecting them from bureaucratic overload And helping them be efficient and productive. In our conversation, we discuss ✅ Is CTO a technical or a business role? ✅ How does Nikos collaborate with other executives as a CTO?...

Join me and Michal Bohanes on this episode as we go back to basics with OKRs. We’ll be covering ✅ exactly what OKRs are ✅ why you should use them to track your goals ✅ how they fit in with your company strategy and vision ✅ and exactly how you can get started with implementing them. Finally, we’ll also look at what alternatives to OKRs exist for companies to use to keep themselves on target fo...

Join me to learn what OKRs are, why use them, how to use them and how to get started. We'll go through the basics of OKRs and break some of the most common misconceptions that hold people back. At the end of this episode, I'll be offering some serious discounts to my Scaleup Leaders Operating System program, and give you a sneak preview of the four critical rhythms every leader must drive to deliv...

Ever been in a situation where your team is in conflict with another team, perhaps over shared resources, and you can't resolve it? Here's how to make progress using a simple document and meeting format that will not only unblock the stalemate, but increase your management's confidence in empowering you to make these decisions in future. Stalemate Buster Template: https://docs.google.com/document/...

Ben Legg is the co-founder of The Portfolio Collective, a company that helps people build portfolio careers and helps companies hire fractional talent. He works with startups, investors and thought leadership. In our interview he talks to me about side hustles – something he’s been doing since his teens – building your portfolio of careers and eventually ditching the day job. Find out when you sho...

In this episode I go through my 5-step process for the execution of OKRs. You've got your OKRs set up, and now it's time to do the work and actually execute them. In this episode I cover: Planning - A basis for change Reviewing - Iterate and socialise Weekly Meeting - Create momentum and course correct Weekly Review - Capture problems and wins Weekly Recognition - celebrate the wins! The Scaleup L...

These are questions I collected over the last weeks from comments and questions asked by future and current clients. 0:04:20 - My CEO is incompetent. What should I do? 0:10:10 - How can I use OKRs to measure productivity objectively? 0:15:13 - My product and engineering team isn't trusted by the rest of the organisation. How do I create trust? 0:28:33 - Can OKRs work in a hybrid, remote or in-pers...

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Allan Boyle of Saltwater Consulting. Allan helps Technology companies Scale Well, and we are both Amazon alumni, so it was good to catch up with him and discuss OKRs in the Scaleup context.    Find Allan on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allanboyle-transformation/ Allan's website: http://saltwaterconsulting.ie/ __________ The Scaleup Leader is...

I was asked by a client (a large multinational) to hold a Q&A on OKRs. They have a large team of OKR coaches and wanted my perspective on several issues they were dealing with.  __________ The Scaleup Leader is a podcast about helping fast-growing tech companies scale better and execute faster with OKRs I (Richard Russell) am an ex-Amazon & ex-Google product tech lead.  Connect with me on...