Manual Direct Bill Customer Set-Up Form: Fill & Download for Free

While running a business you have to track your income and expenses. To run your business accounts smoothly and to save your precious time you need an accounting solution that can take out hassles of your business books. Even it can track expenses, lower your tax bill, generator tons of invoices and can automate the accounting process. Here is the list of the best accounting software which would suit your business requirements.HostBooksEvery software comes with its unique features and has its area of expertise. But if you want most of the customized features at affordable rates then check the features of HostBooks. It offers you cloud-based and automated software, allowing you to access your data anywhere, anytime. Along with that, it helps you to overcome challenges such as accounting, GST, TDS, and E-way bills too. It helps you to generate the bulk of invoices and manage your taxes when the tax season rolls out.QuickBooksQuickBooks is easy to use software that is used widely and comes at affordable rates. It has plans for all sized of businesses and even small businesses can get accounting software with basic features too.FreshBooksFreshBooks is known for its nice invoicing features which are quite easy to use, with just some clicks you can make invoices and add billable time and expenses. If you want to customize the look of the invoice then you can set up recurring invoices, automatic payment reminders, and late fees.Zoho BooksZoho Books is best for small businesses that need simple accounting software. Zoho Books offers most of the basic supports that microbusinesses need just as billing and time tracking features. It also helps you in integrations and comes at reasonable rates comparing the biggest solutions. The best price for all of its capabilities.XeroXero is useful accounting software which provided cloud-based solution since starting only. It helps to save you time and simplify accounting by automating tasks. It comes with 24/7 email and chats support options. You can call the customer support team who can help fast and free of charge. That is ideal for small business owners who need advice instantaneously.These accounting software solutions simplify accounting processes that too at affordable rates. Business owners would find that most of the software are easy to use and save hours while reducing manual data work. If you want to get the best results then take the trial version of these software to check if any of these form a perfecrt fit for you. But be sure what you choose, the type of accounting software you choose directly impacts your business.

That is an amazing question.To be honest, it took me 8 months to launch my first e-commerce store! I followed conventional strategies, to begin with. I incorporated myself, looked for wholesalers, underestimated my marketing budget, developed a great looking store, manually added thousands of products… and never made a sale.Today, after selling my e-commerce business with $2M annual sales and with 6 e-commerce stores on my CV, I understand what I did wrong, and found a way to fix it.I did what most people do — I concentrated too much on creating a great looking store instead of actually trying to make a sale.What I have found is that being successful at dropshipping is all about presenting the right products, the right way, to the right people. Follow these three steps and you will be successful at dropshipping, but it’s easier said than done. Which is why it is much more productive to learn and create along the way.One of my favorite quotes is: “Get going, get better.”What Should I Sell?Anyone starting a new drop shipping business has at some point asked themselves what they should sell.It’s one of the biggest concerns for new dropshippers, and some might jump to the assumption that you need to find trending products to succeed.This isn’t necessarily true.Trending products can definitely help you on your journey, but they won’t decide the fate of your business alone.Here are some requirements to look out for in a good drop shipping product:Cheap to source (< $10 USD)Easy and cheap to ship (ePacket delivery)Steady niche, not trendy nicheA high-quality productNow that we have the framework for picking our products, it’s time to decide what we are going to sell.From my answer to What are the best products to Dropship?:For this article- say we decide to sell makeup brushes, there are thousands of different types of makeup brushes, but we can narrow our focus to the fairytale-themed makeup brushes. This would greatly increase our advantage because we can now focus our brand and marketing campaigns on more targeted customers who not only need makeup brushes but would love fairytale themed makeup brushes.Honestly, who wouldn’t want a set of magical makeup brushes in their beauty arsenal? A company like Unicorn Cosmetics has even built a 7-figure business around it.Here is a quick dropshipping product breakdownProduct: Red Glitter Unicorn BrushesSale price: $28.99 (including shipping.Here is a screenshot of the product from AliexpressHere’s a picture of the same product with improved photography and title - Red Glitter Unicorn BrushesYou can buy the exact same product for $4.99 including shipping.It gets drop shipped from China to anywhere in the world.Let’s look at the math:Costs of goods: $4.99Sale price: $28.99Revenue: $24.00This means we can spend anywhere up to $24.00 to bring in a new customer.With the explosion of unicorn-inspired, rainbow-colored, holographic makeup brushes, you can create a fairytale-inspired dropshipping store to ride the trend and quickly get your feet in the beauty industry.You can also run a more targeted ad to people who not only have an interest in Fashion & Makeup but also have an interest in fairytale themed products.With your store fully set up with products, you can now move on to the next important part of starting your brand – choosing my business name.Choosing A Business NameYour business needs a name, and it may be the most important decision you make. The name of your business has a tremendous impact on how customers view you. You need a name that leaves a lasting impression on your audience.But, it shouldn’t just sound great. I also try to make sure that I choose a name which has the .com domain name available. A great tool to use to get business name ideas is the Shopify business name generator.Some best practices when choosing a domain name:Make it easy to spell itAlways try to get the .com domain firstPick something that has a nice ring to itAim for two words or lessAfter picking your domain name, its time to move on to the next part – creating a business logoLogo DesignIf you do not have a previous experience in logo design, its best to leave it to a professional.You can find many freelance web designers on Fiverr to help create your logo. It usually costs $5.If you are tight on budget, you can use a free software like the Canva Logo Maker.Building Your Shopify StoreOne of the many great things about Shopify is that you don’t need to be a web designer to create your own stunning online store.Instead, you can just use a theme (free or paid) to lay the foundation for your store. Themes are pre-designed templates which you can add to your store with just a few clicks – they’re also customizable so you can add your own personal touch.You can follow the color palates of other e-commerce stores selling similar products and get free images from sources like –Shopify BurstPexelsRemember: e-commerce is all about creating an amazing shopping experience. You want your future customers to have fun browsing and shopping at your store.Shopify AppsThere are a bunch of amazing Shopify apps.Some of my favorite apps are:Oberlo:Oberlo is a great app used in managing your dropshipping products.Easy Contact Form:Perfect for creating great looking contact forms and the forms are 100% customizable.Hurrify:This app helps to create scarcity, so your potential customers are more compelled to become a paying customer.MailChimp:All of my email marketing is done with MailChimp. You can also collect email addresses from store visitors and customers with this app. It will push the addresses directly to your mailing list.Sticky Add to Cart Button:When working with longer product pages, the “add to cart” button disappears, and this may result in customers dropping off. Like the name says, an add to cart button will be always visible on your product page.Sumo:You can use Sumo to promote giveaways and collect email addresses.Now that we have gotten our apps sorted out, it is time to start focusing on the most important part of running a business: the customers.Marketing With FacebookMarketing is the most important part of the success of a dropshipping business, it’s what separates the small guys from the big guys.Mastering Facebook advertising is a major factor in the success of your dropshipping business. Here are the major steps to steps to start and run a successful Facebook Ad campaign.Facebook Marketing - Step #1: Create Your Business Page & Ad Account:Get to know your customers. Be engaging, learn their common interests, learn what keeps them up at night.This will allow you to create better ads for more targeted audiences that you can nurture effectively. Only. Using. Facebook.Facebook Marketing - Step #2: Add the Facebook Pixel to Your WebsiteThe Facebook Pixel can be as straightforward or malleable as you need it to be: either way, you need it if you want to find out what kind of return you’re getting on your ad spend.The Facebook Pixel can be optimized for any type of on-site action. It lets you build remarketing lists. If it’s not already on your website, go add it!Facebook Marketing - Step #3: Uncover Your Ideal AudiencesThere are nearly 2 billion active Facebook users, but not all of them will be interested in your product. You have to find your ideal audience. You can use any combination of geographic, demographic, behavioral, and interest targeting to find your ideal audience.Facebook allows you to find potential customers based on virtually any parameter. You can find amateur pugilists in Arkansas or lifelong pacifists who eat cricket chips. You can find your ideal customer.Facebook Marketing - Step #4: Pick the Perfect Ad TypeFacebook has five main ad formats that all have different technical requirements in terms of the size and aspect ratios that are optimal for posting. These five include:Single image adsSingle video adsCarousel adsSlideshow adsCanvas adsIt is advisable to start with single Image ads as they are the easiest to use and most common Facebook ad type. While they are basic, they’re also very effective, because they’re easy for the Facebook browser to digest and can be used for almost every campaign.Here are the specs for a good single image ad:Image size: 1,200 X 628 pixelsImage ratio: 1.91:1Text: 90 charactersHeadline: 25 charactersLink description: 30 charactersFacebook Marketing - Step #5: Make Gorgeous Ads (That Convert) - Here are the best practices for Facebook Ad Images –Include Humans, Preferably Happy Ones – Including images of people in your Facebook ads is one of the easiest ways to make a real, human connection with your audience. And it’s preferable if these people are happy!Add a Pop of Color – If your ad is all greys, whites, tans, it’ll be easy to skip over. However, if your ad contains all the colors of the rainbow it could be sensory overload for your audience.A good balance of whites and lighter greys, with a touch of a more lively color, is the perfect way to strike a harmonious balance.Make Your Ad Copy Direct and Actionable – Even if your Facebook ad image is absolutely stunning and following all of these best practices, it will not matter one bit if the copy surrounding your image is lacking in direction. While images often speak louder than words, the words are equally important when it comes to advertising on Facebook.After all isn’t your goal to get people to do something? Whether that be making a purchase or simply engaging with your brand, make sure your ad copy is actionable and direct, with a specific call-to-action or CTA.The below ad is an example of a Facebook ad that does so many things right:A clear value prop for the offer (“buy 1 get 1”)A sense of urgency (“This weekend only”)A strong CTA (“get offer”)A discount code so people feel like they’re getting something special (50% OFF)Facebook Marketing - Step #6: Retargeting AdsYou installed your Pixel so long ago: Now it’s time to cash in.Leverage your wealth of site-visitor information to turn prospects into customers. If someone added a product to their cart without checking out, offer them a discount; did a handful of your customers only buy Unicorn Brushes? Remarket to them with a makeup bag or rainbow brush.Another great retargeting ad is retargeting ‘blog traffic’. If you produce a lot of content for your store’s blog, you can retarget your blog traffic. Retargeting blog traffic is one of the cheapest ads you can run. Your retargeted ad won’t promote more content, it will promote your products. If a person organically found your makeup tips blog post, it’s pretty safe to say that they’re interested in makeup products. If you sell makeup brush products on your store and you retarget that blog post reader, they’ll be a great match. First, they may recognize your brand because they were previously on your website. Second, they match your target audience, making them a qualified lead. If one of your blog posts goes viral or gets heavily shared, you’ll be so grateful to have that blog retargeting ad running.Facebook Marketing - Step #7: Eat, Optimize, Sleep, RepeatTesting is the Facebook ads equivalent of going to the gym: You have to do it if you want to be the best.Adjust bids, audiences, and creative (visual and copy) often. Facebook even allows you to set up A/B testing within the Business Manager UI!Facebook Marketing - Step #8: Target New, More Qualified CustomersSpend less time and money digging through disinterested customers. Lookalike audiences allow you to find new customers with attributes that mirror those of an existing audience.From a single seed audience, you can create multiple Lookalikes based on a degree of similarity. That’s how you build scale.No matter how niche your niche is, it’s possible to use lookalikes to whittle the perfect new audience.That’s it! now that you have started making some money, it’s time to start scaling and reinvesting your profits.Scale Quickly & Reinvest ProfitsIf you want to make $100,000 in revenue, you’ll need to know when it’s time to scale. Some store owners are afraid of scaling. They’re scared that it’s not the right time, or what the consequences of success might be. But the truth is, if you never scale your business, you’re never going to make $100,000.If one of the ads you’ve created during your experiments has performed really well, put more money into it.You’ll need to keep reinvesting your profits back into ads. If you want your business to succeed, your business profits need to stay in your business. If you have a 9 to 5 job, you’ll want to use that money to pay your bills. Business money should be used for business only– at least for the first few months. You’ll quickly find that by reinvesting your profits back into your ads that your business grows at a much faster rate. Why? Money makes money.After your business starts gaining some traction, you can start paying yourself a salary. Many entrepreneurs choose not to pay themselves for the first year or two to help ensure their business’ survival.Final Tips for running a successful dropshipping businessKnow when to outsource: When you first start your online store, you need to be as frugal as possible and do as much of the work yourself as possible. However, as you start to grow, it’s no longer possible to manage all your responsibilities independently. When you start realizing that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do your work you can outsource some of your work. You can outsource customer support and social media posts effectively. They’ll be able to respond to customers quickly allowing you more time to focus on generating sales.Build out your content strategy: Have you ever noticed that media companies are taking over the world? It seems like someone is always sharing a cool article on Twitter or Facebook. Most online stores don’t have the time to devote to a content strategy. However, content can prove to be profitable for your online store. It can boost your organic traffic. You can even retarget your blog traffic, which is one of the cheapest ads you can run. Over time, you’ll find that your content helps you more than it hurts you if you produce relevant content that provides value to your customers.Don’t hold yourself back: Skepticism will destroy any chance of your business succeeding. If you spend more time doubting successful people than asking them questions, you’re delaying your success. The truth is people without high school diplomas can out-earn an MBA with hard work. It is possible for a person who grew up poor to build a multi-million dollar business. These aren’t one in a million success stories. You live in a time where you have all the tools and information you need at your fingertips. It’s 2018 – anything is possible. You can become a huge success. But you have to stop acting like making six, seven or even eight figures is impossible. Don’t hold yourself back with your own skepticism. Instead of asking yourself, ‘how do I prove that this platform/method doesn’t work’ ask yourself ‘what are successful people really doing differently that I’ve casually brushed off?’ Mindset correction can be a game-changer. So dream big and prove every doubter wrong, even if that doubter is you.That’s it! Now you know the basics of running a successful dropshipping business. With hard work and a sales push on your side, the possibilities are endless. Focus on why you started this e-commerce business in the first place and let that drive your determination to succeed. No matter where your e-commerce adventure takes you, rest assured that you’ll learn so much more about yourself and witness your levels of creativity, determination, and perseverance reach new heights.I wish you the best on your dropshipping journey!Dania Ortega

One of my favorite interview questions for engineering candidates is to tell me about one thing they liked and one thing they disliked about the engineering culture at their previous company. Over the course of a few hundred interviews, this interview question has given me a sense of what good engineers look for and what they're trying to avoid. I also reflected back on my own experiences from the past six years working across Google, Ooyala, and Quora and distilled some things that a team can do to build a good engineering culture:1. Optimize for iteration speed.Quick iteration speed increases work motivation and excitement. Infrastructural and bureaucratic barriers to deploying code and launching features are some of the most common and frustrating reasons that engineers cite during interviews for why they're leaving their current companies.Organizationally, quick iteration speed means giving engineers and designers flexibility and autonomy to make day-to-day decisions without asking for permission. While I was at Google, any user-visible change to search results, even for low-traffic experiments, required Marissa Mayer's approval at a weekly UI review. Needless to say, while this allowed Google to protect its search brand, it significantly hampered innovation. Optimizing for iteration speed also means that there are well-defined processes for launching products, so that cancellations don't happen unexpectedly after significant time investment.Infrastructurally, optimizing for iteration speed means building out continuous deployment with a fast deployment process, high test coverage to reduce build and site breakages, fast unit tests so that people run them, and fast and incremental compiles and reloads to reduce development time. Continuous deployment, where commits go immediately to production, deserves a special mention. Prior to using it at Quora, it would've been hard for me to internalize that the benefits it provides toward iteration speed outweigh the risks of site breakages, at least for small engineering teams. People are more excited about features and incentivized to fix bugs because changes see live traffic quickly. It's also significantly easier to reason about and pinpoint the source of errors for a narrow window of committed code rather a week or more's worth of batched changes.Team-wise, fast iteration speed means having a set of strong leaders to help coordinate and drive team efforts. Key stakeholders in a decision need to decide effectively and commit to their choices. To borrow a phrase from Bill Walsh, a leader who coached the 49ers to 3 Super Bowls, strong leaders need to "commit, explode, recover," which means committing to a plan of attack, executing it, and then reacting to the results. A team crippled with indecisiveness will just cause individual efforts to flounder. [1]2. Push relentlessly toward automation.In his tech talk "Scaling Instagram", Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger cited "optimize for minimal operational burden" as a key lesson his 13-person team learned in scaling the product to tens of millions of users. [2] As a product grows, so does the operational burden per engineer, as measured by the ratio of users to engineers or of features to engineers. Facebook, for example, is well-known for touting scaling metrics like supporting over 1 million users per engineer. [3]Automating solutions and scripting repetitive tasks are important because they free up the engineering team to work on the actual product. Ensuring that services restart automatically if possible when they fail and that services are easily and quickly replicated at peak traffic is the only sane way to manage complexity at scale. In the short-term, there's always the tempting tradeoff of applying a quick band-aid manually rather than automating and testing a long-term fix.Etsy's motto of "measure anything, measure everything" [4] and its support of open-source monitoring and charting tools like graphite [5] and statsd [6] highlight an important aspect of automation -- that automation must be driven by data and monitoring. Without monitoring and logs to know what, how, or why something is going wrong, automation is difficult. A good follow-up motto would be to "measure anything, measure everything, and automate as much as possible."3. Build the right software abstractions.MIT Professor Daniel Jackson captures the importance of software abstractions well [7]:"Pick the right ones, and programming will flow naturally from design; modules will have small and simple interfaces; and new functionality will more likely fit in without extensive reorganization. Pick the wrong ones, and programming will be a series of nasty surprises: interfaces will become baroque and clumsy as they are forced to accommodate unanticipated interactions, and even the simplest of changes will be hard to make."Part of what allowed thousands of engineers to build scalable systems at Google is that really smart engineers like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat built simple but versatile abstractions like MapReduce [8], SSTable [9], protocol buffers [10], and the like. Part of what allowed Facebook engineering to scale up is the focus on similarly core abstractions like Thrift [11], Scribe [12], and Hive [13]. And part of what allows designers to build products effectively at Quora is that Webnode and Livenode [14] are fairly easy to understand and build on top of.Keeping core abstractions simple and general reduces the need for custom solutions and increases the team's familiarity and expertise with the common abstractions. The growing popularity and reliability of systems like Memcached, Redis, MongoDB, etc. have reduced the need to build custom storage and caching systems. Funneling the team's focus onto a small number of core abstractions rather than fragmenting it over many ad-hoc solutions means that common libraries get more robust, monitoring gets more intelligent, performance characteristics get better understood, and tests get more comprehensive. All of this helps contribute to a simpler system with reduced operational burden.4. Develop a focus on high code quality with code reviews.Maintaining a high-quality code base increases the productivity of the entire engineering team. Cleaner code is easier to reason about, quicker to develop on, more amenable to changes, and less susceptible to bugs. A healthy code review process makes this possible.Establishing a process for timely code reviews, whether pre-commit or post-commit, improves code quality in a few ways. First, the peer pressure of knowing that someone will be reviewing your code and that committing poorly written code will likely let down your teammates is a strong deterrent against hacky, unmaintainable, or untested code. Second, code reviews provide opportunities for the code reviewer and author to learn from each other to write better code.If the code reviews are easily accessible to other members of the engineering team, then the reviews also bring along the benefits of a) increasing accountability for reviewing code in a timely manner, b) allowing team members -- particularly, newer ones -- to model off of others' good code reviews, and c) speeding up the dissemination of best coding practices.Counter-arguments that nimble teams don't have time to spend on code reviews ignore the technical debt that can easily accumulate from poorly written code. Ooyala, in its very early startup days, used to optimize for cranking out as many features as possible, with an absence of code reviews; the result was that while the initial product may have gone to market more quickly, the resultant code became painful to modify, and we spent over a year just rewriting brittle code to eliminate technical debt.Google, at its size, does pre-commit code reviews for all code, but smaller teams don't need to be as comprehensive or strict, and not all code needs to be reviewed with the same rigor. Ooyala later adopted post-commit reviews over email for core or risky changes while I was there. At Quora, we currently conduct all code reviews in Phabricator [15], mostly post-commit, and apply different standards for model or controller code and view code; for sensitive code or for code from newer engineers, we'll either do pre-commit reviews or try to review them within a few hours of the code being submitted.5. Maintain a respectful work environment.Respect among peers forms the foundation for any type of open communication. A place where people feel comfortable challenging each other's ideas is one where sound ideas get forged through debate. A place where people easily get offended is one where crucial feedback gets withheld.In 1948, Alex Osborn outlined the familiar brainstorming approach that's been popular in work environments for the past few decades, where participants come together, set aside criticism and negative feedback, and collectively pool together creative ideas without fear of being judged. [16] Respectful deferment of judgment is key to this type of brainstorming session. Recent psychology research has started to overturn Osborn's approach, suggesting that encouraging debate in brainstorming sessions actually helps to avoid groupthink and generates more effective ideas. In light of this research, a respectful environment becomes even more critical so that attacks are directed toward ideas rather than being ad-hominem. [17]Engineering often spans a wide range of areas (systems, machine learning, product, etc.) and not everyone has the same expertise in each area. A strong team in fact probably ought to have individuals who are uniquely strong in certain areas even if they end up being deficient in others. This sometimes makes it tricky for say, a systems engineer to evaluate the proficiency of a product engineer, but it's important in a healthy engineering culture to respect those differences and to not judge solely based on your own strengths.6. Build shared ownership of code.While it's natural for individuals to become proficient in various parts of the code base or infrastructure, no one person should feel that they own or are the sole maintainer of any one piece. While having individuals become experts that own certain areas for a year or more might increase effectiveness in the short run, this approach ends up hurting in the long run.Organizationally, shared code ownership provides three benefits. First, keeping the bus factor [18] greater than one relieves stress from the maintainer and reduces risk for the team in case the maintainer leaves. It also makes it difficult for that one person to take worry-free time off. I sure don't miss the days when I was the sole maintainer of Ooyala's logs processor and got texted by pager alerts while hiking on volcanoes in Hawaii.Second, shared ownership empowers engineers who aren't knee-deep in the particular area to contribute fresh insights. It frees engineers from the sense that they're stuck on certain projects and encourages them to work on a diversity of projects, which helps to keep work interesting and boosts employee learning and motivation. In the long run, it reduces organizational risk that some engineer feels stagnated and decides to leave. [19]Third, shared ownership also sets the foundation for having multiple team members swarm (a technique from agile development) together on a high-priority problem when necessary to finish a strategic goal more quickly. With siloed ownership, the burden typically falls on one or two people.One mistake that many engineering organizations make too early on is dividing the entire team into subteams with tech leads when the team's still small. Subteams build walls of ownership that reduce incentive to cross those walls, since individuals will likely be assessed by their subteam's objectives. Ooyala had subteams while I was there, and one thing I missed out on was the opportunity to work with some folks on other teams; they've since adopted an agile development process with a much larger focus on shared code ownership that I've heard has made large strides in work happiness and productivity. One aspect of Quora that I've loved is that we've emphasized projects over teams, and I've had an opportunity to work on projects ranging from user growth, machine learning, moderation tools, recommendations, analytics, site speed, and spam detection.7. Invest in automated testing.Unit test coverage and some degree of integration test coverage is the only scalable way of managing a large codebase with a large group of people without constantly breaking the build or the product. Automated testing provides confidence in and meaningful protection against large-scale refactorings that are required to improve code quality. In the absence of rigorous automated testing, the time required for manual testing either by the engineering team or by an outsourced testing team easily becomes prohibitive, and it's easy to fall into a culture of fear for improving a piece of code just because it might break.In practice, automated testing is a requirement for making continuous deployment work as the team grows. Codebase size grows over time as the product grows, but average familiarity with the codebase by team members decreases as new people join. Testing and validation are most easily done by the original code authors when the code is fresh in their minds than by those who try to modify the code months or years later. Encouraging a strong unit testing culture shifts the validation responsibility toward the authors.8. Allot 20% time.Gmail found its roots in Paul Buchheit's 20% project, and he hacked together the first version in a single day. [20] Google News, Google Transit, and Google Suggest also started and launched as 20% projects. I used 20% time while at Google to write a python framework that made it significantly easier to build search page demos. While Google's 20% time may be less productive now than during the early days of the company [21], the notion of letting engineers spend 20% of their time working on something not on their product map remains a cradle of innovation for smaller engineering organizations.Ooyala didn't officially have 20% time while I was there, but I took some anyway and wrote a command-line build tool for Flex and Actionscript that sped up the team's build times, just as Adobe's Flex Builder tool chain started to degrade, and the tool's still in use today even though the engineering team has nearly tripled in size. Atlassian adopted 20% time after experimenting it for year. [22] A variation of 20% time that Facebook's fond of and that Ooyala added later is periodic hackathons -- all-night events where the rule is that you can work on anything except your normal project. [23]Top-down approaches to product planning, while necessary for focusing the overall direction of the company, can't account to for the multitude of ideas that might arise from engineers closer to the ground. As long as engineers are accountable for their 20% time and focus on what can be high-impact changes, these projects can lead to large steps forward in progress. Without official 20% time, it's still possible but much more difficult for engineers and designers to try out crazy ideas -- the dedicated ones basically have to find weekends or vacation days to do it.9. Build a culture of learning and continuous improvement.Learning and being sufficiently challenged are requirements for what psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of "flow", where someone is so completely focused and motivated by what they're doing that they even lose track of time. [24] The direct and immediate feedback loop provided by faster iteration cycles is another requirement.Weekly tech talks provide forums for engineers to share their designs or what they've built, creating an opportunity for engineers to take pride in their work and for the team to learn more outside their immediate scope of work. Documenting processes internally like how a email service works or how to make ranking changes to a search service also empowers engineers to learn and explore new things on their own, nicely complementing 20% time. At Quora, we do this by running an internal instance of Quora where we ask product- and development-related questions.A corollary of building a culture of learning is focusing on mentoring and training to make sure that everyone has the basic algorithms, systems, and product skills necessary for success. The more an engineering organization grows and the more effort gets spent on recruiting (particularly college recruiting), the more effort needs to be invested into mentoring and training. It might seem burdensome for a single mentor to spend an hour per day for a new hire's first 4 weeks on the job, but that investment represents less than 1% of the total time that hire will spend in a year and has significantly high leverage in determining whether the person is set up for success.10. Hire the best.Hiring the best is the foundation for many of the other philosophies listed. It's hard to respect someone if you think they're a B-level engineer. It's hard to give someone autonomy in product development if you don't trust their product instincts. It's hard to recognize the right abstraction to build without enough engineering experience. It's easy to fall into a trap of building something complex without other smart people to challenge your ideas and drive you toward simplicity.There's a saying around Silicon Valley, coined by Steve Jobs, that "A players hire A players. B players hire C players." [25,26] Focusing on recruiting and hiring the right people is hard but critical to effectively growing an engineering organization. Yishan Wong, who previously was an engineering manager and director at Facebook, argued that hiring has to be the number one priority for everyone in the engineering organization, not just for managers, but for engineers as well. [27] He also quite rightly points out the difference between "hiring the best" and "hiring the best candidate that you've interviewed."In the early days of Ooyala, we were so overwhelmed with the queue of inbound customer work that we nearly caved in to lowering our hiring bar so that we could hire enough people to get all our work done. I'm glad that we didn't, as the technical debt from lower quality code and weaker engineers on the team would've ended up hurting the team and the product.Building a good engineering culture is certainly a lot of work, but the resulting work environment is well worth it.Looking for more best practices in engineering? Download a free, sample chapter of my book, The Effective Engineer. It's based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at the top tech companies around Silicon Valley and packed with lessons, stories, and actionable insights on how to make you and your team more effective.--------[1] Bill Walsh. The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership http://books.google.com/books?id=shUB6M9IzZcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bill+walsh+score+takes+care+of+itself&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MA-gT96-LeaJiAKXwJSmAQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=explode&f=false[2] Scaling Instagram.http://www.scribd.com/doc/89025069/Mike-Krieger-Instagram-at-the-Airbnb-tech-talk-on-Scaling-Instagram[3] Scaling Facebook to 500 Million Users and Beyond. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=409881258919[4] Measure Anything, Measure Everything. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/[5] http://graphite.wikidot.com/[6] https://github.com/etsy/statsd[7] Daniel Jackson. Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-abstractions[8] http://research.google.com/archive/mapreduce.html[9] What is an SSTable in Google's internal infrastructure?[10] http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/[11] https://thrift.apache.org/[12] https://github.com/facebook/scribe[13] http://hive.apache.org/[14] http://www.quora.com/Shreyes-Seshasai/Posts/Tech-Talk-webnode2-and-LiveNode[15] http://phabricator.org/[16] Alex Osborn. Your Creative Power. http://www.amazon.com/Your-Creative-Power-Alex-Osborn/dp/1569460558[17] Groupthink. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all[18] What is "bus number" and why do you want it to be greater than 1?[19] How do experienced engineers at startups avoid stagnation due to the overabundance of operational issues?[20] Communicating with Code. http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html[21] How does Google (company)’s Google Innovation Time Off (20% time) policy work in practice?[22] http://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/life[23] Inside Facebook’s final Palo Alto Hackathon. http://gigaom.com/2011/12/16/exclusive-inside-facebooks-final-palo-alto-hackathon/[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)[25] What is an "A Player"? Steve Jobs is always emphasizing that “A Players” only want to work with “A Players.” What are the attributes of said people?[26] What I learned from Steve Jobs. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2011/10/what-i-learned-from-steve-jobs.html#axzz1unynLRLT[27] http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-hiring.html