Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Nahm: The technical vs non-technical divide harms B2B software companies

Sarah Nahm · Startup Hiring Advice from Lever CEO Sarah Nahm with Holly Liu · Y Combinator · Jul 10, 2019 · at 47:57

Sarah Nahm, CEO of Lever, argues that separating employees into technical and non-technical camps undermines organizational cross-pollination.

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“We needed our quote, non-technical people to embrace and adopt like designing systems that were as sort of like scalable, sophisticated, scalable, and have that sort of engineering mindset about their work. And then we also needed our technical people to understand our customers, understand the value proposition, to like really embrace some of the qualitative aspects That we as a B to B software company really needed them to like actually really, really get our customer and why we were doing some things and get our go to market motion and our sales pitch and why we were doing these things like on a deeper level. And so we just realized that that stereotype wasn't serving us.”

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