Effective Team Management at a Busy Software Company

Vinay Patankar August 16, 2026

Business Systems Explored, Management

Software team leader organizing work on a release planning board

Effective team management in a busy software company means setting clear priorities, protecting focus, learning directly from customers, and shipping on a predictable cadence. In this episode of Business Systems Explored, Vinay Patankar and Tony Brown speak with Nathan Kontny, who took over Highrise in 2014.

Nathan moved into the CEO role almost overnight and started coding on the same day. He learned what customers needed by owning support, then balanced product delivery, hiring, marketing, and the daily work of leading a software team.

Listen to the episode

Listen to Nathan Kontny explain how to effectively manage a growing software team.

A key lesson from Nathan

“If you can’t empathize with your customers, you’re never going to do your best work.”
Nathan Kontny

Show notes

In the interview, Nathan discusses:

How Nathan came to be the CEO of Highrise (and started coding the same day he signed the contract)
Figuring out exactly what people don't like about a platform
What to do when everyone mistakenly thinks your company is shutting down
Adjusting instantly to being a CEO
Why you need to build software for yourself and solve your own problems with it
How to avoid interruptions when transitioning team leadership
Making your first hire when you take over a company
Owning customer support at a SaaS company
Analyzing customer support tickets for customer feedback
Adapting your own tool for internal use
Fixing it when there's a lack of momentum in your product
Using a 'train schedule' to ship code faster
Implementing a train schedule for effective product marketing
Why Nathan sends a newsletter every three weeks
Why you need to question it when projects take longer than one week
The key metrics to pay attention to when you're sending newsletters
One bad day to send newsletters on
Delaying your feature announcements in accordance to the news cycle
Writing feature announcement subject lines (and the best one Nathan's tested)
An effective call to action to leave at the end of your feature announcement
Why you should grow your startup team slowly
The systems Nathan uses to manage his workflow and systems
Managing deadlines with Trello boards
The best video conferencing tools for calls of 10 or more
The arguments against daily and weekly standup meetings
Using Slack integrations to save time instead of building native software
Using Zapier to make a better Slack/Twitter integration
The best tool to track mentions and backlinks
Managing customer support over Twitter and Slack
Using a solid onboarding process to get a new hire up to speed quickly
Training all new employees with customer support
Chopping bits out of the new feature so you can hit the solid deadline
Automating recurring task reminders to get stuff done
Adding personality to your feature announcements
Experimenting with making credit cards required for free trials
Why you should do customer support over the phone (and why it's scary)
Making big changes to established products … and surviving

Putting the ideas into practice

For teams applying these lessons now, Process Street is a single Compliance Operations Platform. Its Docs and Ops capability areas, plus built-in AI, help teams document how work should run, execute recurring workflows, assign ownership, collect approvals and evidence, and improve the process over time. See how a structured software development workflow turns priorities and release cadence into repeatable execution.