Engineers at Medium are not solely relegated to the process of building features – we’re actively included at all stages of product development.

Every employee at Medium is encouraged to share product ideas during team meetings, brainstorms, and in more thorough write-ups on our internal blogging tool, Hatch. These ideas often become actual projects on a team roadmap, or are built out during one of our quarterly full-team hack-weeks (for instance, our Android audio player began as a hackweek project). Engineers, designers, and product managers work in tight collaboration throughout sprint cycles, by participating in user research studies, providing feedback on designs and product briefs, and soliciting feedback as features iteratively come to life.

Boxers wake up every morning and think about how we can make our customers happy.

We’re always asking “What can we do better?”. At Box, everyone is involved in making product decisions. During team brainstorming sessions, engineers actively participate in identifying what are the highest impact items that will improve the product. It’s common at other companies to only ask engineers about the technical feasibility of a product, but at Box, we are always considering things from both engineering and product perspectives.

It is awesome to hear and see student-athletes get committed to the school of their dreams because they used the product we built.

Club directors would not be able to keep track of helping all their players through the recruiting process without SportsRecruits. These stories make everyone at the company care about the product. We have a place for anyone to suggest product features or changes. We have a roadmap visible to everyone at the company, an environment where team members can play with the projects that are currently in development, and a test sport which everyone at the company has an athlete account for.

Global trade is complex, and it takes a sophisticated solution.

Our competitors were formed before 1994, and have all failed to modernize in a comprehensive way. We’re built from the ground up as a tech company, and have teams working on ocean and air shipping, trucking, warehousing, consolidation, and customs. We found product-market fit early, and have kept our edge.

The makers worked closely with the business teams early on, so our engineers are deeply embedded in the product improvement cycle. We even encourage team travel to gather intelligence. From our trucking team meeting customers across the US once a quarter, to our air team spending a week in Hong Kong to help load our plane, we stay close to the problems we’re solving.

We are a technology enabled media creation company.

We work on large scale/budget media creation projects for Fortune 500 companies. There are two product lines to our company:

• Agency - We are the consulting wing to many companies in the realm of influencer and content marketing. Our clients include JCPenney, H&M, Michelin, Victoria’s Secret, amongst many others. Some perks include free lip balms during the winter and invitation to fashion shows in NY during February and September. Almost everyone on our team has attended a fashion show in NY in the past!
• SAAS - We have a software product that helps enterprise companies manage their influencer collaboration process. We also use this product internally within our own agency.

Our clients place their trust in us to build the best product for cannabis.

Each and every day, thousands of cannabis retail transactions are processed using our software. Without our product, our clients would be less efficient, non compliant, and unable to operate. Going forward, our vision places Meadow software at each stage of the cannabis supply chain: all the way from when it is grown to when it is sold in a retail environment or an online ecommerce store.

Gathering customer feedback is an integral part to our development process. Every two weeks, our Sales, Customer Success and Engineering teams come together to discuss client feedback and changes to the roadmap. We are looking for engineers who enjoy working on a product that its users truly depend on to operate their business. Every decision we make can have a huge positive impact on our clients’ business.

We think the research doesn’t mean anything until you place the technology right in the hands of your users and customers.

For us, that’s video creators, ranging from semi-professionals making videos for YouTube or Facebook, to those who work in the productions for TV or films. We are building the platform that allows any video creator to translate their content into the World’s languages.

We believe that the only way to keep going forward is to build a fantastic video translation platform that’s a delight to use. It means that we have to work closely with our users, not only on how people are using our platform, but also what impact translated videos are making for creators as well as their viewers.

We solve technical challenges to move the business forward.

As a delivery company making 15 minute deliveries in a heavily regulated industry, there’s no shortage of operational and technical challenges at Eaze. We love problem solving within these operational constraints but ensure that each decision advances the product forward. We have customers, contractors and businesses that are dependent on our services. Our customers come first, and we make the best engineering decisions we can with the end goal of making a product that customers will love.

We test product ideas by doing quick mocks and shipping MVPs.

We’ve been product-driven from the very beginning. When we started, we’d create visual designs, go to Dolores Park in San Francisco, and interview potential customers (aka moms who are playing at the park). Now, we build and ship things, and use A/B testing (with Taplytics) to gauge conversion and retention. Our product roadmap is defined by our metrics and talking to users.

We operate on 1- or 2-week cycles. For example, for one week we’ll focus on making changes that will improve retention. The following week, while we wait for data to come in from usage of the retention-related features, we'll ship something, with a focus on growth-hacking. The third week, we’ll be able to see data from our retention experiments and decide to keep iterating or move to the next item on the list.

All in all, our guiding principle is to build great products that customers will love and pay for. We don’t want our users to become our product, which is why we’ll never show targeted ads or sell your data to third parties. While we are already profitable, we are also well-funded by Collaborative Fund, Sesame Street, FundersClub, Locus Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Our goal is to provide homeowners with a free, public resource to help them better understand what’s happening in their neighborhoods.

Our database now contains every licensed contractor across the U.S. – over 2.5 million of them. Users can search our database, drilling down into categorized contractor profiles which are enriched using government data from state licensing boards, Better Business Bureau ratings, and more, as well as customer reviews. We want to build a service for homeowners and contractors, so we’ve left the subscription-based, members-only model that Angie’s List uses, and are instead offering them free access to our database and user reviews.

Technology does not exist in isolation.

At NerdWallet, we don’t see technology as an end unto itself, we see it as a means by which we help our users make financial decisions with clarity. Our engineering team is excited about solving hard personal finance problems through the lens of technology. That means developing systems that can generate insightful recommendations for millions of users; that means working with complex data science models to predict how much money a user will need in 20 years and how to help them get there; that means rethinking mobile apps and understanding what personal finance decisions need solving in the moment. Ultimately, it means developing complex technologies for solving real world problems.

Our four founders have product and technical backgrounds.

Naturally, the vision for the company has always been using technology in a product-focused way. Our mission is to create a product that is beautiful and also functions seamlessly in our customer’s day-to-day. At the core of our business, we are empowering local governments to make smarter and more efficient decisions by way of our product, which is why we care a great deal about the design and functionality. Being product driven does not mean that we’ve slacked on being customer focused. We are here to serve our customers, since this product is made for them. We travel to customers regularly and really value their feedback. By focusing on making this the best product it can be, we are serving the larger community of city planners who plan more efficient cities for everyone who lives in them.

Check out a demo of our product!

Range was founded based on three main observations about how the world is changing:

1. Globalization means that teams are made up of people with more diverse backgrounds, and work forces are increasingly distributed.
2. The millennial generation has entered the workforce and brought new expectations for work: people are increasingly looking for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
3. Mobile, the cloud, and the rise of artificial intelligence mean that workplaces are increasingly complex

Combined, these have a huge impact on the way we work and necessitates different ways of working and managing. These new ways of working will require new tools to facilitate communication and coordination; top companies have huge internal teams dedicated to building such software.

So where do we start? Range starts with the individual and the team. What do they need to be successful? What problems and challenges do they feel? And then asks, how can technology help them with these challenges and enable teams to fulfill their purpose.

Range helps keep people informed and feel connected with their teams. Our product directly serves a customer need and in order to do so, we make sure all of our team member understand the landscape we’re operating in and that everyone empathizes with the needs of our customers. One way we do this is through using the product ourselves, but another is by regularly discussing customer research and product learnings from sales and customer success as a team.

Our product is constantly evolving.

The product organization has been built up significantly since our SVP of Technology, Jason, joined us in 2017. He is very much a product thinker, and with iterative planning and a good strategy set in place, GitHub will be moving into new and exciting territories. At a high level, we have general strategies and directions in place to steer the company, and then what we actually build is determined at the team level. This allows individual engineers to think critically not only about how we build things, but also what we should build.

GitHub is unique in that almost every engineer in the world uses it. It’s so integrated with software development that you’ll interact with our product on a daily basis even if you don’t join our company. For many of us, this is a huge reason we decided to work at GitHub. As engineers, we are contributing to something that not only amplifies our own professional craft, but also acts a catalyst for progress in our field.

We’re product-focused and customer-oriented.

Coinbase is building a new open financial system, and we need to experiment with different approaches. We are not married to any particular approach (i.e. centralized vs. decentralized), and stay close to our customers in order to figure out what they need. We’re currently building a number of different products (i.e. Consumer, Pro, Prime, Markets, Earn, Paradex, Wallet, Commerce, Asset Management), and lean towards shipping quickly.

Lever’s revenue source is entirely from our product.

We do not build ad-based consumer software, our product is our value. Our reputation as a company is based on having the best product in the industry, and we have never strayed from being a product-focused company. We’re proud of what we’ve built, and naturally, we are big users of our own product.

Not only is Lever committed to making a high quality product, but we also want every team member to be able to connect their personal contributions to the overall business. Results from our most recent R&D Engagement survey showed that 100% of Lever employees understand how their work impacts Lever’s goals. It’s easy to feel connected to our product, and maybe more importantly, easy to see how your work contributes to making it better.

At Asana, the entire company uses our product, which means everyone you’re working with has opinions about the product and really cares about it because it’s part of their everyday workflow.

We have processes in place to collect ideas for our roadmap from every part of the organization—not just from engineers, but also from user operations, sales, marketing, and more.

Our business model also makes us more product- driven. Because a significant portion of our sales come from our end product and we expect people to try our product for free and understand its value before they pay us for it, our product has to be sticky.

At Asana, we’ve taken our own approach to writing our product roadmap. We rely on a clear strategy where everyone can connect the dots from their daily work to the company mission, and a collaborative process where the people closest to the work can influence our direction. We constantly iterate on this process to make it better. For example, next year, we’re looking at ways that we can be more problem-focused rather than solution focused and have PMs and other people work on project proposals throughout the year. We’re also considering how to best incorporate more long-running teams while still retaining the flexibility to shift people to the most important work. Learn more about how we write our product roadmap from Jackie Bavaro, one of our PM leads.

The team is united by a common love for great products.

We believe teams that prioritize product quality (vs. sales strategies) will become market leaders in their space. Our product is driven by user-centric design, guided by our customers, and built by product-minded engineers.

Highly sceptical of our own ideas, we will discuss alternatives at great length just to make sure that we make the optimal decision. We are also very data-driven: we capture every piece of feedback through all our customer interactions – be it through email and live chat support, during sales or customer success calls, or even on-site visits with customers. Everything gets processed through Productboard (a phenomenal product of itself!).

Productboard allows us to prioritize and focus on the features that will have the biggest impact. It keeps us honest and focused, while avoiding the traps of tending to the squeakiest wheel and trying to please everyone :)

We are a team of product-driven engineers.

Understanding the interplay between design, business, and technical challenges is something we highly value at Webflow. Engineers should never think about technical problems in isolation, we should also maintain sight of what what makes a strong product. We care deeply about the product we’re building and not just because we want to see it successfully used by our 30,000 customers, but because we also want to use the product for our own projects (there are a lot of fun/crazy projects by our Webflow team members!).

We try to provide the best experience possible when developing new products.

The various products we develop cater to emerging and established markets. We differentiate ourselves by providing excellent value, first-class user experiences, as well as approaching problems in new and novel ways. The products we build are meant to attract customers organically.

Rather than purchase and utilize off-the-shelf components, we prefer to build custom solutions to solve business problems. By utilizing open source technology, we are able to build tools and products that not only work better, but also cater to a user’s specific needs.

In addition to the 3 million .xyz domains registered, we also own and operate over 100 websites online. We do marketing, cybercrime / abuse mitigation, advertising, and even have a couple mobile apps.

Because our product saves lives and because every team member believes in the need for it, we all make decisions that prioritize product improvement.

We want deliver a standout user experience. We want to improve product performance. We want to build additional features that will actually help patient care. As a company, we want to do all of this so clinicians can quickly get the relevant information they need in time-sensitive moments when making critical decisions.