Squads

15/10/2026

📱 The heart of Squads is the Squads App.

Working with external teams can easily become a maze of emails, spreadsheets, invoices, and status updates.

That's why we built the Squads App.

From a single place, clients can:
🚀 Hire teams and start projects
📋 Create, review, and approve sprints
👀 Track progress and deliveries
✅ Accept completed work
💳 Manage payments and invoices

The workflow is intentionally simple:
Plan → Build → Review → Approve → Pay

No chasing documents. No wondering which version is the latest. No unnecessary admin standing between ideas and delivery.

The goal is simple: make working with Squads feel as straightforward as managing your own product team.

Because building great products is hard enough.
Working together shouldn't be.

14/10/2026

🤖 We are not agents.

AI can help us write faster, think broader, and get more done.

But there's a subtle risk:
We start sending polished responses without adding our own judgement.

A message can be clear, professional, and completely miss the most important thing:
What do you actually think?

The real value isn't in generating words.

It's in bringing your perspective, experience, and judgement to the conversation.
💡 Use AI to amplify your thinking, not replace it.

Before hitting send, ask:
"Does this genuinely reflect my view?"

📖 Read more in our latest article:
https://squads.com/blog/we-are-not-agents

When we let AI write every email and message without bringing our own judgement to the result, we start removing ourselves from the conversation. AI can help us think, create and work faster. We still need to question it, correct it and make the work our own.

08/10/2026

💡 What does a Fractional CTO actually do?

The term gets used a lot, but the role is often misunderstood.

A Fractional CTO isn't simply a part-time CTO. They're there to help companies make the technical decisions that are hardest and most expensive to reverse later.

Typical responsibilities include:
🔍 Technical due diligence before fundraising or partnerships
🏗️ Architecture decisions such as build vs. buy, database selection, and platform strategy
💬 Translating between technical teams and non-technical stakeholders
⚙️ Establishing engineering processes before bad habits become expensive
🧠 Providing senior technical judgment when a company isn't yet ready for a full-time CTO

The real value isn't writing code.

It's helping founders avoid decisions that become costly six months down the road.
Because some technical choices are easy to change.

Others become part of the foundation.

06/10/2026

🍺 Thank You, Bits & Pretzels!

A big thank you to everyone who stopped by to meet us at Bits & Pretzels.

It was great to connect with founders, investors, product leaders, and innovators from across the startup ecosystem. The conversations, ideas, and challenges you shared are exactly why we love attending events like this.

A special thanks from Wandaye Ethan and the rest of the Squads team for making the event such a memorable experience.

💬 If we met in Munich and you'd like to continue the conversation, discuss a project, or explore ways we might work together, we'd love to hear from you.

📩 Reach out to us at [email protected]

Until next time, keep building. 🚀
Photo: Munich’s Marienplatz, designerpoint / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

01/10/2026

🌍 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲, 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐲𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐲.

At AReLTeam, we've brought together 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬who are ready to contribute, create value, and support their families through meaningful work.

Their expertise includes:
💻 𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐍 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭
📊 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬 (𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐞𝐥, 𝐒𝐐𝐋, 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐈, 𝐓𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐮, 𝐏𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐧)
🤖 𝐀𝐈 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 & 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
📈 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 & 𝐂𝐌𝐒 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭

These aren't people looking for handouts.

They're skilled professionals looking for the opportunity to contribute to your projects, your team, and your vision.

💬 If you're hiring, building a team, or looking for project support, we'd love to connect you with exceptional talent ready to make an impact.

28/09/2026

📍 Meet Us at Bits & Pretzels in Munich!

We're excited to share that the Squads team will be at Bits & Pretzels in Munich from September 28–30, 2026! 🚀

If you're attending, we'd love to connect.

Whether you're building something new, tackling your next product challenge, looking to exchange ideas, or simply interested in meeting over a coffee, let's make time to chat. ☕️

Send us a message or reach out at [email protected] to arrange a meeting.

Looking forward to meeting founders, product leaders, innovators, and builders from across the ecosystem.

See you in Munich! 🍺🥨

Photo: Munich’s Marienplatz, designerpoint / Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

24/09/2026

💡 A quick Agile myth-bust.

A lot of teams say: 👉 "We do Agile."

What they often mean is: 👉 "We do Scrum."

They're not the same thing.

Agile is a set of principles.
Scrum is one framework built around those principles.

You can do every Scrum ceremony and still miss the point:
📋 Standups become status meetings
🔒 Sprint plans become rigid contracts
🚫 Change becomes the enemy

The goal was never standups, boards, or sprints.

The goal is to:
✅ Deliver value
✅ Learn quickly
✅ Adapt when things change

The framework is just a tool.

The principles are what matter.

22/09/2026

💡 The best question to ask a developer isn't "What did you build?"

It's: 👉 "What went wrong, and how did you find it?"

Many non-technical founders judge developer portfolios by how polished they look.
But a beautiful interface can hide fragile engineering.

Instead, listen for how developers talk about:
🔍 Difficult bugs they solved
🤔 Decisions they'd make differently today
📈 Lessons learned from past projects

The strongest engineers aren't the ones who've never made mistakes.

They're the ones who've learned from them.

💬 What's your favorite interview question when hiring technical talent?

17/09/2026

🚀 What's new at Squads?

This month we've been exploring a common challenge: how do you improve a product while keeping delivery moving?

Highlights from our latest newsletter:
🌐 Rebuilding Plumery's website with a modern headless architecture
🎮 Helping Game Limiter grow its product and market presence simultaneously
🤖 Using AI-assisted development to modernize the Squads App from AngularJS to React
✅ Practical lessons on getting more value from test automation
🍺 Meeting founders and innovators at Bits & Pretzels in Munich later this month

📬 Interested in product development, software engineering, AI, growth, and startup scaling?

Read on 👉 https://143556517.hs-sites-eu1.com/squads-newsletter-september-2026

💬 If you're attending Bits & Pretzels, let's meet and compare notes over coffee.

This edition covers Plumery’s website rebuild, Game Limiter’s product and growth work, and two articles on AI-assisted development and testing. Each looks at a different part of the same challenge: improving a product while keeping delivery moving.

15/09/2026

🤖 AI is doing more of the marketing work.

Writing content. Repurposing case studies. Creating videos. Automating workflows.
The surprising part?

Marketing expertise is becoming more valuable, not less.

AI can produce content.

People still need to decide:
🎯 What the audience cares about
✅ What "good" looks like
⚠️ What shouldn't be published
📈 Whether the campaign achieved its goal

The bottleneck is shifting from production to judgement.

💡 AI is a force multiplier for expertise, not a replacement for it.

📖 Read more in our latest article:
👉https://squads.com/blog/ai-does-more-of-the-work-marketing-expertise-matters-more-than-ever

AI can run complete marketing workflows, from approved source material to published content. Experts define the rules, check exceptions and improve the process. Newsletters, videos and case studies show what can run automatically and where human judgement still matters.