Our mission is to replace the need for physical paper.

GoodNotes was created from our founder's frustration of taking readable and reusable handwritten notes on his first iPad. However, people use paper in many different ways, not just for taking notes. As we build the best product to serve our customers, one of the biggest challenges we face is providing solutions for all of our customers’ varying use cases for ‘paper.’

Our particular insights:

1. There is something magical working with a pen on digital content.
2. Digital pens will be a commodity. All productivity machines are going to be touch screen, keyboard and a pen. We already see it happening with Surface and Pixel Slate.
3. A lot of software basically mimic what people do on paper.

All members on our engineering team are makers. Everyone has built things outside of work and we think that’s one of the most important traits of product-minded engineers. Since the beginning, building a high quality product has been our first priority.

We are committed to rehumanizing communication, and maintain a direct line of communication to our customers.

Being a self-funded company is a double-edged sword. It is amazing that we’ve been able to grow to our size without VC funding (it’s rare in tech) and it allows us to build our company and product in the way we find to be best, as opposed to being told what to do by an outside firm that has other priorities. Unlike most VC-funded startups, our growth depends entirely on our ability to deliver to our customers. As a result, we frequently conduct customer feedback interviews and rely on the feedback our Customer Success team gathers to shape our product roadmap and prioritize stories at the beginning of each sprint.

We also take advantage of the fact that we dogfood our own product. We use BombBomb every day: we use it to communicate within our own company; our Sales and Customer Success teams use it to communicate with customers; and our recruiting team uses it with candidates. Using our own product for multiple use cases often helps us identify pain points that we can then surface to our Product team.

In 2019, we went from three to six PMs in order to focus even more on serving our users. We have split a robust application into more manageable product lines, placed a greater emphasis on data and testing, and also hired a dedicated analyst to support our Product teams.

BombBomb is a product that we all personally love and are passionate about sharing, so much so that we published a book about it. Rehumanize Your Business is a guide to help businesses leverage personal videos to accelerate sales and improve customer experience. If you want to learn more about BombBomb's product, who we are, or how to join us, check out the video below and browse our open roles!

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 and help all their athletes throughout 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. Our product roadmap is visible to everyone at the company along with 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.

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 identity is tied with what we build.

Our primary goal is to make products that bring real benefits to the lives of our customers. While most finance-related products bring dread to consumers, we’re actively working to break that stigma and put our users’ experiences first. If you’d be interested in a better spending experience, we’re happy to share an invitation to check out our invite-only product! (Email [email protected] for access to Point.)

As we build our team, we’re seeking detail-oriented engineers who go out of their way to not only ensure that our products’ UI matches designs in Zeplin pixel-for-pixel, but also that our backend processes are crafted in a beautiful and elegant manner that optimizes user experience.

Each member of our founding team comes from a product-focused background:

• Patrick (Co-Founder and CEO) was previously a director of product at Metal Pay and founder/CEO of Crumbs.
• Sid (Co-Founder and Chief Designer) was previously a senior interface designer at Apple and Mercedes Benz.
• Kenan (Co-Founder and CTO) was previously a lead full-stack engineer at Metal Pay, Swipe Labs, Motiv, and the first mobile engineer at The RealReal.
• Clio (first Backend Engineer) was previously an engineer and data scientist at Acorns.
• Pete (Senior Backend Engineer) was previously a senior engineer at Merkle Data and Sunsama.
• Andrew (Director of BD & Ops) was previously building partnerships at American Express and HotelTonight.

We use our product every day, which means every dev becomes a product-focused engineer over time.

Before you even begin the onboarding process as a new hire, we ask you to do a Product Teardown. It’s the only time that you’ll be able to see Amplitude for the first time, and we take full advantage of this. (Although as Amplitude grows, there are fewer and fewer people who’ve never seen or used our product before!) Product Teardowns are exactly like they sound; you’ll be asked to use the product and call out every flaw and issue. It helps us get fresh eyes on something we’ve looked at for a long time, and for some, it serves as the beginning of their transformation into becoming a product thinker.

Regardless of your background, role, or team, everyone at Amplitude eventually develops a product mind. Simply from using Amplitude as a user and communicating so frequently with customers, you’ll learn to consider designs, UX/UI, and user stories in everything that you do. Your days of “just coding” are over! Everyone on the team is involved in brainstorming different solutions for their pod, even if you’ve never had previous experience with a product mindset. If you don’t have strong product opinions, you just need to use Amplitude a little bit more/longer.

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.

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. For example, we used Amazon SageMaker to build a machine learning platform.

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.

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.

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.

As a product-led company, we value clarity for ourselves and our customers.

Building products at a product-led company allows us to work closely with our Product, Design, Data Science, Data Engineering, and User Research teams, and we work hand-in-hand throughout the entire product development process. Deep in Asana’s essence is clarity: we serve to give teams clarity into their work, and we do this by getting clarity about our own work.

At Asana, every non-trivial project starts with a design. Engineers share designs through Asana projects to allow each other to engage in discussions and ask questions. They share learnings and patterns, and use these to jump-start plans for future projects.

Articulating our mental model helps ensure we understand the logic of our ideas. It enables us to iterate faster than we can through writing and rewriting code. Once we agree on what we’re doing, we can execute without needing to regularly check that what we’re building still makes sense.

If you’re passionate about product, you’ll be happiest at a company like Cameo where we live or die by our product.

We do not have clients, and we don’t have physical hardware. We are a highly digital, highly scalable, consumer tech company. We believe Cameo is one of the best companies in the world for product-focused engineers to work and that we provide one of the best opportunities to create a magical consumer experience.

Simplicity is at the heart of how we think about, design, and build our products. Not only do we want our products to be simple to use, but we also want our MVPs to be the most simple solutions to the highest-impact problems. It’s easy to over-complicate a consumer product like ours, but we stay focused by always prioritizing the experience of our end users. Cameo started with Steven, our CEO, hand delivering and orchestrating videos. Devon then came on as Cameo’s technical co-founder and made it work through a Facebook messenger bot – the next most simple thing to do. We then built a website and app, and now continue to listen closely to feedback from both our talent and consumers who use Cameo to refine and improve the user experience.

At BetterUp, we build features in cross-collaborative squads.

Squads typically consist of a Product Manager, a Designer, a Full Stack Engineer, and potentially a Frontend Engineer, Mobile Engineers, and/or stakeholders from other organizations. These squads own Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), related to a key business problem. Squads are semi-permanent and develop deep expertise in a problem area through building features in the space and user interviews.

Engineers are expected to deliver value continuously in this space. This is even the case when product and design are exploring possible problems and solutions for the squad’s next project. Engineers participate in this discovery process to collaborate on potential solutions and help ensure that the engineering cost of a proposed solution is appropriately balanced against the value being delivered. Additionally, we believe that providing this early context during discovery can unlock creative solutions once delivery begins. At every step of the way, we expect engineers to think about whether the thing being built is actually delivering the desired end result and whether there’s another solution that could have a more outsized impact.

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.

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.

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.

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 had 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.

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 :)

How are we going to win the market? By having the best product.

In a lot of ways, we are creating an entirely new category. Today, machine learning teams spend ~80% of their time creating and managing training data. We’re offering best-in-class tooling, collaboration, and dedicated labeling services as the first training data solution for machine learning, and even though we’re the first to do it, we’re going to do it really well.

If you consider where the world is moving and what the competitive landscape looks like in artificial intelligence, there are many ways to “win.” You can solve the hardest engineering problem, or you can build software to help people collaborate. Some companies are working to have the best label services, but our plan is to build the best software product that will be the GitHub for training data. Rather than having every company create their own expensive and incomplete homegrown tools, we’ve created a training data platform that acts as a central hub for humans to interface with AI. When humans have better ways to input and manage data, machines have better ways to learn.

Upfront work to validate a hypothesis is always the right investment, and we’re rigorous about what we know and what we’re less certain about.

It’s easy to change a spec, it’s a bit tougher to change a design mock, even harder to change code, and a major project to modify a feature that our customers are already using. We ship quickly, but we’re always doing user research so when we start a new project it’s with a strong hypothesis about what’s wrong and how we can fix it.

We spent almost a year learning about security and validating the product, market, business, and product need upfront, all without code. Now we’re net profitable with incredible revenue growth and a strong mission to work toward, so we’re glad we didn’t rush things.

We’re very Richard Hamming about things: “A random walk of random decisions will not get you anywhere near as far as those taken with your own vision of what your future should be.” If this resonates with you, we’d love to meet you.

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.

Our platform is like a Swiss Army knife – there’s no one right way to use it.

Every year, we set annual goals at the company level, which teams then use to help set their own quarterly goals. Since our founders are also product managers and engineers by trade, they’re heavily involved in product planning and guiding our product teams.

We’re building a Swiss Army knife-like platform – something that can be used in several different ways depending on the problem at hand. For example, the way a kindergartner uses the product will differ greatly from a 12th grader. Features need to be built with various end users in mind and are always prioritized by what will drive the most value for the most parties. Teams are not organized by which customer segment they focus on. Instead, teams have the opportunity to work on various products. Engineers may build a parent-related feature first, and then focus on improving a teacher-related tool the next quarter.

While Seesaw helps to close the loop between teachers, students, and parents, we also dive deeper into serving each individual party. A recent feature one of our product teams launched is the ability for teachers or students to upload PDFs. Teachers or students can annotate the PDF, have the ability to record their voice with instructions or learnings, and utilize PDF uploads in creative ways within the platform. This feature was a frequent request from our customers and opens up utilization of Seesaw to a larger middle school and high school population.

Now more than ever, remote learning solutions are essential. With the coronavirus pandemic, we now have 15% of all K-5 teachers in the U.S. active on Seesaw daily, and many other teachers using Seesaw around the world. If any of the above excites you, we hope you’ll get in touch soon!

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 that 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 built your payments stack inhouse, 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.

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