True or false: You’ve failed at something in your career before. If you answered false, well that’s a bit hard to believe, but it just means there is still plenty of time to fail. And that’s a good thing.

“Remember that the numbers don’t lie. Ask them what percentage of the team lives in which cities or time zones. If 98% of the team lives in Waterloo, that’s probably a cool startup, but they’re also probably just hoping to eventually go back to an office.”

“If you’re doubling every year, that means half the team is new, and only some set of people have all this knowledge. If they don’t document it or onboard well, the new people don’t learn it. So knowledge is lost or at least siloed and culture tends to dilute unless you proactively try to find a way to reinforce culture.”

“Most people think collaboration is about helping other people, which is important. But it’s also about being brave enough to ask people for help. Many of us don’t out of fear of looking dumb. But I spend the vast majority of my week talking to dozens of startup founders, and every single one of them says that they appreciate when people ask questions early and often.”

“A common scenario is when an early engineer has the company grow around them. They wonder whether they should become a manager so they can feel like they’re making an impact. I think that’s the worst thing to do, because it’s probably not what they’re best at and not actually what they want to do—they just think it’s something that helps them become higher scope or more relevant in the organization.”

“Invest in engineers and make them part of the conversation when it comes to planning and setting goals. Instead of just saying that I’m going to hold a hard line at 20% allocation on x, I’d rather empower someone to have a seat at the table and drive the direction of what we’re going to do.”

“I love learning, and at the beginning of my career that was my emphasis. As time went on, a bit of that focus shifted to finances and stability. Eventually it came to a point where I didn’t actually want or enjoy going to work anymore. I was being paid a really high salary, but I would wake up and dread the day ahead of me.”

In this edition of our peer-to-peer Q+A, Commit community member Fábio Miranda asks for suggestions to help Engineers learn and progress with growth hacking.

“The first crisis is going to be a big opportunity for trust building. Look for those situations and really go for it. Leave it all on the floor with that first crisis because it’s going to pay dividends later.”

“In my less guarded moments, I refer to myself as a bureaucrat. Because bureaucracy is actually a very software-like scaling model. It’s not necessarily a bad word. Bad bureaucracy is bad and good bureaucracy is good.”