Engineering teams in product-driven companies

Building the best possible product is at the core of everything we do.

At Mudflap, we’re building an app that provides drivers of diesel-fueled vehicles instant fuel discounts. After working as the Chief Product Officer at Trucker Path, Sanjay (co-founder and CEO) realized that technology could be used to solve a larger industry problem. While big fleets get major fuel discounts thanks to their large gallon volumes, owner-operators and small fleets are often left to fend for themselves. He partnered with Sharon (co-founder and Head of Product), a former co-worker at Trucker Path, and thus in 2020 Mudflap was born. You can read more about it and how the app works here.

Our team is product-led with pragmatic engineering. In other words, engineers start with a problem we are trying to solve for customers, then use the best technology available to create solutions. While we’re a technology company that cares deeply about technology, we are not working just for technology’s sake. Instead, we are using it to solve serious supply chain issues and help owner-operated truck drivers stay in business.

As we build our platform, our engineering team prioritizes usability and high-quality solutions that are fast and reliable. We are laser-focused on giving customers a consistent experience whether they are at a small mom and pop fuel stop or a chain with hundreds of locations. Our recipe for success is straightforward: a great product plus our teams doing their best work.

We’re completely transforming communications for satellites.

Before starting Sphinx, we were senior government employees at the Department of Defense, where we ran an in-house software consulting agency for the Air Force. We kept getting thrown massive tire fires within the space portfolio – think needing to fix GPS. Given that we all rely on GPS every second of every day, it’s pretty shocking that in reality, the infrastructure is so fragile. We founded Sphinx in order to solve a lot of the problems we encountered in government, and to bring those solutions to the commercial market.

That status quo of satellite operations is slow, manual, and expensive. This was fine when there were only hundreds of satellites in space, all with limited capabilities and operated by governments and very large corporations. But in 2022, the landscape has drastically changed. The number of satellites in space is increasing by an order of magnitude every year, and newer satellites are increasingly capable of, and sometimes require, rapid and frequent maneuvering. This new reality in space requires a new reality on the ground. Satellite operators need to be able to move vehicles quickly, in real-time – whether it’s to avoid the increasing amount of traffic in space, link up with a refueling station, or maneuver defensively against space debris.

At Sphinx, we’re solving this problem by building a vehicle-agnostic communications infrastructure to allow satellite operators to utilize diverse antenna networks. In both commercial and government use cases, we're creating a modern set of APIs that allow satellite operators to connect to Sphinx. We'll then facilitate all the connections to disparate antennas/antenna networks, and maintain them. Ultimately, our modern technology will help positively shift the paradigm of national security and enable satellite start-ups to more quickly and cheaply command and control their vehicles.

We’re improving how businesses move and track funds at scale.

Modern Treasury allows businesses to move money with confidence. Specifically, it’s an API and web application that allows teams to manage the funds in their corporate bank accounts. To give an example: when Airbnb just started out, they didn’t have much business yet, so their founders used hacky solutions like uploading CSVs to their bank portal. However, once there were many thousands of venues and stays, mistakes likely started piling up. (Like missing error notifications when some subset of the payments failed.)

Had Modern Treasury existed then, companies like Airbnb might have used our software as the interface between them and their core bank accounts. Instead, they had to integrate directly with banks that use decades-old mainframe technology, requiring custom work for each bank. As of this writing, Airbnb has a money team of ~150 engineers (>10% of their total engineers) who maintain their integrations with banks all over the world. With Modern Treasury, we’re streamlining payment operations within one interface, helping companies like Gusto, ClassPass, and BlockFi reconcile over $2B in funds every month (and growing!).

Our mission is to enable anyone to make sense of their business data, no matter where it lives.

We’re building Plus for a customer that we know well. Our founders, Chloe and Dan, met as teammates on their first project as management consultants, where they spent a lot of time wrangling data from multiple sources to create presentations to influence business decisions.

The average tech company today uses nearly 100 different SaaS tools, and the thing we hear from customers over and over again is that people have too much data in different places and not enough time to make sense of it in order to make good decisions. That's why we created Plus: a tool to help anyone make sense of their data no matter where it lives.

As a team, we expect everyone to have a shared understanding of our mission and how their work impacts our customers. Every engineer participates in customer interactions and contributes to shaping product solutions. We believe that investing more deeply in product understanding enables our feature teams to operate with more ownership and autonomy, make better technical decisions, and deliver value faster.

We spend a lot of time talking to customers, and we try to understand their underlying problems rather than just taking their feedback at face value. Every decision we make is grounded in our product principles to keep it simple for the end user. It also allows us to rely on familiar concepts and work with existing collaboration tools and workflows. For example, that’s why we decided to focus on image-based “Snapshots” as a familiar and universal way to surface business information, rather than building data extraction tools that would require our customers to learn new paradigms.

Every product decision we make is deliberate.

We believe in understanding the frameworks and systems in our stack, and aren’t afraid to build our own when appropriate. For instance, our video decoder and database were built in-house. Doing so enabled us to bring responsive and elegant interfaces for collaborative video editing into the browser, with low latency in a beautifully-designed way.

We love working with customers when they’re trying to do something unusual and ambitious with video, while striving to generalize requests to bring them into the core product. In order to build the best product and most flexible infrastructure possible, we implement incremental changes and code refactors. Everyone on the team is involved in product decisions. Instead of a management chain, we have long conversations to define and develop the soul of the product.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about working at Newfront is that each day, we show up to redesign an entrenched, archaic industry.

We’re revolutionizing insurance in a variety of ways, but arguably the biggest change is in client service – and that’s where you come in.

One of our primary products is an account management platform that helps our account managers accomplish their work far more efficiently than would be possible at other brokerages. Our client dashboard automates routine transactions, so our customers are able to self-serve many common requests like finding evidence of their insurance coverage. And by using our broker dashboard, Newfront brokers can easily understand what’s happening with their clients without having to call or email them.

By leveraging forward-thinking technology and always talking to our customers, we’re fundamentally changing the experience of insurance for users of all kinds. We currently serve over 10,000 clients, and place more than $2 billion in premiums annually. The pandemic hasn’t slowed us down either and we were actually able to bring on some of our biggest brokers remotely. And in even more exciting news, we recently merged with ABD Insurance, putting our valuation at $1.35B. Learn more about how we’re continuing to lead the revolution to digitize insurance here.

We go where the work is!

We’re product-focused engineers and we view code as one of many tools in our toolbox that we use to deliver an incredible guest experience. Every engineer owns and maintains their own product roadmap with associated metrics. They also spend time in the field. We go wherever the work is, which could mean seeing the product live and soliciting feedback, conducting user research, or actually rolling up our sleeves and working a shift in one of our restaurant locations. We believe the best products are built with our users, not for them. As a result, engineers are directly involved in the product discovery process and have often surfaced new opportunities, designed, built, and launched solutions end-to-end.

We’re on a mission to build the best platform for developers to add banking features to their apps.

Banking is a critical part of our economy – yet it's still built on decades-old mainframe technology. Our modern API has gained serious traction, helping neobanks go to market in weeks, allowing retail fintechs to easily open accounts and issue cards, and much more. As we scale, new hires will have the opportunity to work on exciting projects such as iterating on our developer dashboard, expanding our bank console, adding new APIs to our platform, and tackling infrastructure projects to facilitate massive growth. If that sounds interesting to you, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Good enough is not good enough.

We focus on delighting users every single day and earning a reputation for excellence. Regardless of whether it’s a big new product, or the smallest interaction in our documentation, the WorkOS quality bar is exceptionally high. We strive to impress and are willing to sweat the small details.

This goes beyond just visual design and applies to everything we do, from providing insanely great user support, to the high-integrity experience candidates have when interviewing with us. A so-so ship or a buggy release may seem small on the day-scale, but they can have ripple effects for years. We are making a first impression with new users every single day, and our goal is to stand above the noise.

Our status as a non-profit gives us a unique edge to effect real-world change.

Unlike many SaaS companies where product leaders make all of the decisions, our sustainable business model as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit means we always put our customers’ needs first. Not only are we 70% self-supported, but we also have large institutional investors such as Google.org and Johnson & Johnson that invest because they know our platform works. Clinical studies show our model improves the health outcomes of underserved patients and by partnering with 400 safety net organizations in 43 states, we’re able to reach millions of people every month. That’s why we only take monetary funding with the understanding that we’ll build the features that have the greatest impact on the most customers, not because one particular customer or donor thinks we need something.

Ultimately, we look at our data, user interviews, and what's happening in the market to drive our strategy. For example, when COVID-19 hit, we saw a 10x increase in our mass-messaging feature as Federally Qualified Health Centers and Free Clinics worked to deliver trustworthy information and help patients stay on top of chronic conditions. In addition to bolstering our platform to serve this need, we also provided videos in English and Spanish to educate patients about telehealth, teach them how to use the most common platforms, and help them better prepare for video calls.

We are product-driven at Curai because patient care comes first.

Providing the best patient care is our North Star and always comes first. Curai's customer-facing product is an application that lets patients chat with real doctors and receive care (including diagnoses, recommendations, prescriptions, lab orders, etc). We do this by running a virtual primary care clinic, wherein we forge longitudinal relationships with our patients and help them be healthy and navigate the healthcare system. We also have a provider application that is used by our clinical associates and doctors to serve our patients. Our long-term vision for the product involves providing access to the world's best healthcare to everyone in the world, powered by AI and ML tools that drive down the cost of care while also driving up the quality. All of our teams, whether clinical product or machine learning or research or platform and infrastructure, measure their impact against metrics that are directly related to the product, with particular emphasis placed on quality and developer velocity.

As an example of how things roll up to product, consider the clinical team, which not only offers insight into medical best practices but also serves as a key stakeholder in shaping our product vision. One of our first hires in the early days of Curai was Geoff Tso, a doctor, computer scientist, and clinical faculty at Stanford who now also serves as our Head of Clinical Innovation. Geoff works across the stack in a multidisciplinary fashion to tie our automation efforts back to product, direct the future of our medical knowledge base and our interoperability efforts, and provide clinical guidance on features as they are planned and executed. Everything ends up tying back to our product efforts in one way or another. This kind of razor-sharp focus on the product and patient outcomes is part of the way we do things at Curai.

Code is a tool, a means to an end.

We are product-focused engineers who look at code first and foremost, as a tool that we can use to make a positive impact on the world. Code in a vacuum, or a product with no users, doesn’t have any impact. We’ve built a product-centric engineering organization for people who are driven by a desire to contribute to something larger than themselves. As a result, every engineer at Mode has a significant influence on our product. Having context for what we build allows us to have meaningful discussions about product tradeoffs, and sometimes even sales and marketing strategy.

Our product-driven culture stems from Mode’s earliest days. Having worked on data teams at Facebook and Microsoft, our founders have extensive experience in our product domain. They met at Yammer, where they collectively led sales, monetization, and product analytics. In 2013, they brought their vision and a team to life, and Mode was born. As our company and team has grown, more and more people have had a significant influence on that vision.

We want Let’s Do This to be the place you go to to find events.

While our world moves more communities and interpersonal interactions online, we still believe that the best human experiences happen in person. We are using technology to enable better experiences and transform an industry that has been technologically underserved.

We’re well on our way to building the single source of truth for endurance events, so much so that our event discovery product is already embedded within the Runner’s World site in the U.S. and UK. Upcoming challenges include scaling out content aggregation to new geographies and niche sports, while building a platform to increase the number of content contributors and generating the kind of rich user-generated content that really sets our information apart.

Major projects on the horizon include integrating with the many registration platforms used by organizers to allow our users a seamless checkout for any race, ramping up our recommendation engine built on top of athlete data from trackers like Strava and Garmin, and building awesome tools for the supply side to succeed in marketing events on our platform. The one we’re most excited about though is the community project kicking off in 2020. Anyone who’s ever done a race knows how important the people around you are when training, and how much you love showing off your newly minted medal at the end! We’re going to bring the achievements you’re most proud of online into your Let’s Do This profile, and build communities of like-minded people in pursuit of similar goals to help you achieve yours.

We are currently a team of 11 product-focused engineers. Creating value for our users is our north star, and given how much we dogfood our own product, we have a thorough understanding of end-product goals. We do our best to have everyone work on projects that personally interest them. While we haven’t always been able to deliver on this promise, we truly believe we are a better team and will build better products when everyone is passionate about what they're building.

Minerva is an education company built on a foundation of technology.

While we do make technology bets — our platform is predicated high-quality real-time video and collaboration across the globe — when it comes to planning what work we do, it’s all driven from the product perspective: how can we improve the student and instructor experience? How can we improve student learning outcomes by collecting information and surfacing feedback at just the right times? How can we improve A/V and platform reliability to make the technology fade into the background, so instructors and learners are deeply engaged in their discussions? What can we do on the Forum that we can’t do in physical classrooms?

To facilitate the Product first approach, we use a series of divergent and convergent exercises. Design sprints help us brainstorm new products and features in a structured fashion, and we give a large degree of autonomy to engineering pods to figure out how to best achieve their goals. These are often paired with constantly asking “How might we…?” to solve a scenario. To start converging, we use storyboards, prototypes, quick user testing, and finally episode planning.

Minerva students on the Forum.

We’re all bonded by the mission to give engineers, designers, and medical practitioners more confidence in their products.

We’re currently in the building phase and constantly iterating, with the goal of making our platform 10 times cheaper than what’s on the market today. To that end, we value speed over perfection. It’s more important to us to get work out as quickly as possible, and then iterate based on the feedback we receive from our customers. Engineers join regular fireside chats with customers to learn firsthand what’s working and what needs to be improved. This allows us to ensure we’re building the right thing and improving our product in a way that will actually have the most impact for our customers.

Given that we’re early-stage, our customers know that things won’t be 100% perfect and that’s okay, they’re happy to share their feedback. From there, we can easily adjust our roadmap to prioritize the features that will serve them best. Mindfully investing in tech debt, not over quality, but over perfectionist quality is what helps us move the needle and gives us an edge over legacy incumbents in the space.

We’re building the gold standard in cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and taxes.

CoinTracker provides cryptocurrency holders a holistic view of their crypto in a unified interface. This is enabled by connecting their wallets and exchanges, and automatically and continuously synchronizing their data. As builders, we’re excited to solve real problems that improve peoples’ lives and consistently wow users.

Being wallet and exchange agnostic and having a holistic view of one's crypto uniquely positions us to address some of the biggest problems in cryptocurrency, including portfolio management, and tax calculation & optimization. To that end, our product roadmap is highly strategic. We consider distribution (to increase our reach in the market), what’s feasible (any engineering constraints), and user feedback (what pain points can we solve). We enable users to contribute their input through our public roadmap. We started CoinTracker in order to serve our personal needs managing crypto, but it has matured along with the market. We’ve launched partnerships with TurboTax and Coinbase to better support our users, and between October 2020 to April 2021, saw the amount of crypto assets being tracked on CoinTracker grow from $1B to $20B.

Ultimately, we have the opportunity to turn a service available to hedge fund billionaires into software that automatically optimizes people’s portfolios & taxes year round, with the click of a button.

We’re transforming the way consumers interact with CPG brands.

Our co-founders, Kim and Sarah, discovered firsthand when building a clothing company that the process of subscribing to consumer products is not a great experience. People either end up with way too much (of consumer goods like toilet paper, toothpaste, etc.) or too little. Thus, Repeat was born, with the goal of improving the consumer reordering experience and driving brand loyalty for consumer packaged goods customers.

We always strive to put the consumer first, making reordering seamless with features like pre-populated shopping carts, SMS and email notifications when they’re running low on a product, and a 15-60 second checkout process. This eliminates the need for subscription trappings that aren’t on their timeline and removes the hassle of creating accounts and remembering logins. Similarly, we’re able to focus on both sides of the market by leveraging consumer data to help CPG brands retain customers. We’re even taking things a step further with CPG House, a by-application space for CPG founders and operators. Members benefit from exclusive event recaps, recordings, and content from our team and can talk, share, and strategize with others in the community.

Engineers work closely with the product team and feedback loops are tight – starting early on with technical investigations that inform product strategy. We collaborate throughout the entire product development lifecycle to maintain alignment and incorporate the customer’s best interest in every feature. For instance, David took the lead on our Postscript integration, working hand-in-hand with the rest of the team. We believe engineering work at Repeat should be informed by the value delivered and prioritize accordingly. When a big deal closes because of a new integration, sales and engineering celebrate together.

We’re creating a whole new layer (secrets), which opens up endless opportunities.

If you think about GitHub owning the code layer or AWS owning the infrastructure layer, we’re creating an entirely new layer by centralizing all your secrets in one place. Our long-term vision is to own the space between our customers’ code and infrastructure, and we make sure every feature we build today has that perspective in mind.

To give you a sense of what the current landscape looks like, we’ve noticed three big trends that have created a real need for Doppler:

1. Growing list of deployments. There are more places where people deploy code than ever before. This is in part due to the adoption of microservices and dedicated hosting environments per use case (ex: Vercel for frontend, Lambda for background jobs, etc).
2. Adoption of 3rd-party services. Before you’d build your payments stack in-house, but now you use Stripe. Same goes for SendGrid and Twilio. The more services used, the more secrets there are to store and manage.
3. Microservices. Companies and projects are using microservice architectures more than they ever did before. This leads to more groups of secrets that need to be managed. Your billing service likely won’t use the same variables as your React frontend app.

These three trends are creating a whole slew of new problems for developers. What GitHub did for code, we are doing for secrets. One central place to manage all your secrets across projects and deployment locations. In fact, in 2021 we went from 30,000 secrets under management to over 360,000!

If any of the above interests you, we’d love to tell you more and encourage you to reach out!