Michael Pryor is the co-founder and head of Trello at Atlassian, the visual collaboration tool that gives millions of people around the world perspective on their projects. Pryor is also a co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a software development company that created popular developer tools, including Trello, and sits on the board of Stack Exchange.
Pryor graduated from Dartmouth College with an Honors B.A. in Computer Science.
What were your early years like?
I had a typical middle-class childhood in the suburbs in the United States. I had a brother and a sister. My brother, who was older than me, became very interested in computers and introduced me to them. I remember getting a magazine with computer code in it, not being able to read it at all, but typing it into the computer and watching magical things happen. That was my first connection with computers.
What was your first management role?
In 2000, my friend and I started a software consulting company right before the first dotcom bubble burst. We had hired two people when all of the consulting work disappeared. All of the sudden, we had two employees but no revenue, and we had to lay them off. It was very difficult.
What are some leadership lessons you’ve learned?
Three important lessons that I have learned have been, one, to not run out of money. No matter what, if you run out of money, then nothing else matters. Two, I learned to maintain a vision. It has been my responsibility to tell the company’s story to people over and again and to keep them motivated and excited about the future. Three, I have learned to recruit. The only way to scale a company is to hire talented people to do what you have been doing, to let that work go, and to trust them do it instead.
Often, I try to practice what we call servant leadership. It is not the responsibility of management to tell people what to do but to advise and help them. Although people will sometimes need you to help them to make a decision, most of the time people who are close to the problem and have the appropriate information simply need to be given the responsibility and freedom to decide for themselves.
How do you hire?
We frequently conduct audition-based interviews. I firmly believe that when interviewing people, you should make them perform the job that they want during the interview. For example, for developers, have them sit in front of a computer, use the tools that they will use in the developer environment every day such as Stack Overflow, and actually write code. The closer that you can get to having potential workers perform the job that they will do, the better the understanding that you will have about how well they will do the job.
How to build a great company culture?
On the surface, the vision for a company might seem like what the company wants to build, what its product is, and how that product will change the world. If the company succeeds, then it will grow, but there will be new problems and challenges to face, and companies need to add people to their teams as they scale. It is pivotal to communicate the culture of the company to others because that attracts new people. In our company, we believe that hiring people from all over the world is critical to developing our product, so we hire a lot of remote workers. Two thirds of the company’s people work from their homes, which are all over the world. It is important for us to communicate and embrace that trend of remote work and, by doing so, foster that kind of culture in the company.
How do you overcome indecision?
There is no such thing as perfect timing or perfect decision making. Only hindsight can determine whether you have made the right decision. Even if results fall short and decisions turn out to have been misguided, you stand to learn far more from making a bad decision than from not making a decision at all.
As a leader, you have to recognize that even when you delegate decision-making responsibility to your team, situations will arise in which the team cannot decide, no one has enough information to make the decision, the amount of risk involved in making that decision is significant, and the team simply will not act. Those situations are opportunities for you as a leader to make decisions for your team.
What advice would you give a first-time entrepreneur?
You have to conceive the whole world as your market. I tell people that if they are going to develop software or an online service, then they need to assume from the outset that others do not speak the same language as them and that allowing them to be able to use the product or service requires supporting two languages. Only that foundation can afford everything required to support three, four, or even seven languages in the future. Today’s world is interconnected, and it is far easier to develop a product, take it to the market, and reach a broader international audience than it was in the past. If a company starts with that foundation and achieves success later on, then it will be in a far better situation at that point.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
This post is part of “CEO Talk” series, which features leaders around the world speaking about their journeys. What does it take to become a successful entrepreneur or CEO? What is the path to success? What challenges did people face and how did they overcome them? Lan Anh and her guests answer all these questions and much more. To view the entire series, visit here.