Did my company's future hinge on one talented developer?

Meyer: I made the company into what it is today, and you know that.

Noach: We can't afford to lose you, and that isn't a sustainable business model 

Meyer

I like to get to work early on Meeting Mondays, get some work done before the meeting marathon starts: 10 a.m. with the software development team; 11:30 with the COO, CMO, and the Big Boss; afternoon with the data science/strategy development guys.

I’m not sure why everyone likes to start the week with meetings. Personally, I would rather get my teeth into actual research and development work first and then do the talking later. (I mean, everyone knows a meeting is really just an excuse for coffee and doughnuts, right?)

There were a whole lot of things on my agenda that week, but as always, unexpected glitches would end up taking most of my time: a stubborn bug, a tweak gone wrong. One of the software developers was working on an enhanced image recognition project that would take our software to the next level — something very welcome considering the competition out there — but it was a complicated process, and releasing something that wasn’t actually ready would backfire badly.

At exactly ten o’clock, I saved my work and headed to the conference room, where the software development team was waiting for me. Asher, Nachi, and Gideon had joined our team during the last year; they were great guys, and talented ones too. They’d taken my product and really hit the ground running, adding features, tweaking, streamlining, and really just bringing our vision — mine and the Big Boss, Mr. Noach Muller’s — to life.

Okay, let me back up here, because I know I tend to do this — living immersed in a tech world sometimes makes you forget that not everyone speaks in code.

I’m CTO of a tech start-up that’s around five years old — and baruch Hashem, very successful. We’ve developed an AI-powered diagnostic tool for health care facilities that doctors use to assess information and make diagnoses. When the company opened up, this was a crazy idea. And while it isn’t as revolutionary anymore, our clientele is happy and growing, and we have a fantastic team that works day in and day out to make the product better and better.

Like now, Asher’s brainstorm with the image processing.

“How’s that coming along?” I asked him, when we’d finished passing the Danishes around (eh, no doughnuts today?).

Asher brought up his files on the large screen behind me, clicking as he demonstrated what he was trying to create, and indicating where things were snagging.

“There, the system didn’t recognize that part of the last image,” Gideon pointed out.

“Linear processing is a whole lot simpler.”

“I know, but when we figure this out, it’s going to take DiagnoWave to the next level. Tzali keeps saying we need an edge, something unique that they can push as a marketing angle.”

I felt a momentary stab of annoyance. Tzali, the CMO, was a great guy, but he knew nothing about product development and seemed to think that IT guys were fix-all magicians who could will products out of thin air. These things take weeks, months, sometimes years. I know he’s great at marketing and the Big Boss loves that, he’s all into branding and marketing these days, but at the end of the day, the product is what needs to sell.

I could predict what would come up at the upcoming leadership team meeting: they’re going to talk about scalability again, toss out phrases like cloud-based solutions so we could grow bigger and provide faster turnaround, and I’d have to sit there and explain that we can’t move too fast, that the product needs to be ready, that the software team needs to handle it.

Oh, well. All part of the job, right?

I pushed the thoughts away to focus on Asher again. Glitches in the system — that’s my thing, that’s what I’m here for.

“Let’s see what we can do here,” I said, leaning forward to take the mouse.