Engineering teams in product-driven companies

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!

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.

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 5,000 clients and have grown 12x in the last two years. The pandemic hasn’t slowed us down either – our business more than doubled in 2020 and we were actually able to bring on some of our biggest brokers remotely. Learn more about how we’re continuing to lead the revolution to digitize insurance here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The global pandemic only expedited these trends and highlighted the urgent need for new tools to facilitate team communication and coordination for all companies, not just established companies that have 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 members 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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, tax calculation and optimization, user-friendly trading, and payments.

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 solving complex, often counterintuitive problems.

Home care is all about the people, and there are a lot of things that people are uniquely great at. We empathize, improvise, and are physically there to help out. But there’s a lot that technology can do to uplevel what humans can do, like quickly distribute critical information and leverage data to improve efficiency and quality at scale.

The primary products we work on are an expansive web app for our internal operations team, native apps for our care professionals, and a web app for our care agency partners. When it comes to vetting side projects or even infrastructure or design systems, we always look at how it translates to the success of care delivery through the lens of logistics. Logistics can be very messy, especially when humans are part of the equation, which is why we’re focused on step changes. Are we making relationships better? Are we helping people find their long-term care professional faster? We find these intricate, often counterintuitive problems super interesting. By equipping people with the right framework to understand what the right decision is and how it can fuse with design feasibility, experience, and sustainability, we’re able to achieve hard-fought solutions that are transforming the space.

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!