The company is the product too

Founders and leaders put enormous care into their products and very little into the company that makes them. Meetings, promotions, how decisions are written down, how bad news travels: these are usually inherited, copied from a previous job or left to happen by accident. Then everyone is surprised when the company behaves in ways nobody chose.

Amara built Fernway, the booking and records platform for independent clinics, from a spreadsheet to three hundred people without a round of layoffs. She has treated the company as a product from the start: researching how people actually work, shipping small changes, measuring the results and retiring the processes that stopped earning their keep. Some of it worked well and some did not, and she shows both.

To close Summit, Amara shares the practices she would keep in any company, the ones she abandoned, and a few of her letters to staff that explain why.

What you will take away

• Ways to design how a company works with the same care as its product
• The practices that helped Fernway grow without layoffs, and their limits
• How to communicate a hard decision so that people trust the next one