But seriously, I think there’s a lot we have learned over the last year, and I hope that the previous blog posts give you inspiration and food for thought. My most important take-aways from 2020 and most of 2021 are:

1. Create your vision of the target state first. It must be at the beating heart of your organization’s business. And it must be so inspiring and compelling that if someone was to pitch it to you, you’d be switching jobs to be part of the team that builds it.
2. Plan top-down early and refine. Test and verify bottom-up. Never rely on a sales pitch. Trust your engineers — but also challenge them.
3. Build an amazing team. Obvious, but really very hard. Never settle for average. Never hire brilliant jerks. Hire for attitude, not experience or skills.
4. Define an organizational model that can scale as you grow the team. Keep it flat. Rethink roles, reporting lines, strengthen lateral leadership. Offer personal development paths. Minimize team dependencies.
5. Define solid fundamental engineering principles, a harmonized software development process and tech stack(s).
6. Embrace the cloud. Go API-first. Rent what others build better. Build what you can do better than others (even if not your ‘core business’)
7. Be bold! Just because nobody did it yet doesn’t mean it cannot be done.

As this is the end of our first blog post series, I’d like to thank the best team and I’m proud to be part of: The Emma Sleep Tech team! Kudos to all Emmies and our partners for allowing me to tell such an exciting story about what we love to do!

You rock! \o/