Freshworks' early failure to balance sales and engineering headcount
Girish Mathrubootham · Girish Mathrubootham: Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | E1142 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Apr 19, 2024 · at 29:26
Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshworks, reflects on early organizational missteps where sales growth outpaced engineering bandwidth while engineers were tied up with framework upgrades.
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“We were really, really growing fast and we were hiring a lot of sales folks and the sales wheel was spinning faster than the engineering wheel. We didn't hire enough engineers and like we added like thousand customers or something like that. And feature requests were coming, flying in and our engineering team was actually involved in a Ruby on Rails upgrade. So we couldn't even ship enough. And so I realized that, okay, How do you balance hiring across the org? And so we did not have a process to do headcount planning in advance looking at, okay, where are the revenue numbers going to be next year and how much like now we have a full blown headcount planning process, but that was a big mistake that I did where I didn't hire product developers enough.”
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