LATEST
The Culture You Want to Build, with Charity Majors
Honeycomb.io co-founder and CTO Charity Majors joins Allen to share what she’s learned growing Honeycomb from idea to 170-person distributed company, including what goes into being a good manager beyond supporting your reports, how to build a team that feels supportive and safe while still keeping boundaries and limits, systems thinking for teams and cultures, the difference between generic company values and ones that take a stand, and why having a healthy culture is more important than having a novel one.Ep 19
Nov 15, 2023 • 62 minBuilding Great Experiences Using LLMs, with David Hariri
Ada co-founder David Hariri joins Allen to talk about an audacious product discovery process that kicked off a 250-employee startup, limitations of hand-scripted workflows, strengths and weaknesses of LLM techniques like code execution, RAG, and function calling, and how support automation may create whole new business models.Ep 18
Oct 25, 2023 • 58 minThe Puzzle of Engineering Leadership, with Michael Lopp
Michael Lopp, aka Rands, joins Allen to talk about the fundamental need for growth, finding your team’s core motivations, the value of writing for developing clear thinking, the joys and perils of writing a book, the art of a compelling presentation, habits for editing and refining writing, and fostering clarity of responsibility – and curiosity – on your team.Ep 17
Oct 04, 2023 • 48 minCoaching New Managers, with Tiffany Conroy
Tiffany Conroy, former VP of Engineering at SoundCloud, shares what she’s learned about where new engineering managers stumble and how to support them, considering whether you want to be a manager at all, the value of explicitly asking those around you what success means, the power of having the confidence to say “I don’t know”, coaching managers through their first case of underperformance, how rigid role definitions hold back folks that perform both product and engineering work, the power of the Six Thinking Hats for making intense decisions, and the cultural responsibilities of senior leadership.Ep 16
Sep 20, 2023 • 55 minTelling Product Stories with Adam Lisagor of Sandwich
Adam Lisagor, Founder of Sandwich Video, shares what he’s learned about the nature of storytelling, about how to zoom out to tell the story of your product, understanding the emotional valence of our work, when pre-visualization and storyboarding does and doesn’t pay off, spotting great talent, the value of making pretty good decisions quickly, learning how to let go (a little bit) as a founder, execution-centric leadership vs. results-centric leadership, what kinds of products he likes to invest in, and making people glad to have worked with you.Ep 15
Sep 06, 2023 • 56 minSmall But Mighty, with Ridwell Co-founder Aliya Marder
Aliya Marder, Co-Founder of Ridwell, joins us to share what she’s learned about the people-service mindset for product work, the demands of running a startup with a real-world footprint, the power of a higher mission for rallying a company, doing more with a smaller team, the pathologies of product backlogs, strategic communication past 150 employees, and the challenge of delegating for detail-oriented leaders.Ep 14
Aug 23, 2023 • 40 minEngineering Practices That Pay Off, with Later CTO Ian MacKinnon
Ian MacKinnon, CTO of Later and Mavrck, shares lessons learned building Later from founding to success to acquisition – and from the startups that weren’t so fortunate. We discuss early engineering practices that paid off, approaches for moving fast and tolerance for breaking (small) things in that pursuit, the pros and cons of PaaS platforms like Heroku, the insurmountability of building the wrong thing, the virtues of boring tech stacks, and Later’s successes using GPT-4 to migrate and modernize legacy codebases.Ep 13
Aug 11, 2023 • 46 minThe Intersection of Business and Design, with former Shopify Product GM Lynsey Thornton
Lynsey Thornton shares what she learned helping Shopify grow almost 100x as GM of Core Product, VP of UX, and more. We review some common challenges companies hit as they scale, how to identify hires that have high growth potential, how different personalities contribute to team effectiveness, how to design an org for maximum impact, user research as a driver of strategic outcomes rather than checkbox-checking, and how to level up as a leader.Ep 12
Jul 26, 2023 • 54 minProduct Management and Growing Up as an Organization, with Mailchimp’s Bruce Alderson
Bruce Alderson, Senior Product Manager at Mailchimp, shares what he’s learned in 20 years as a CTO, engineering leader, and product manager. We discuss the role of multi-disciplinarians in large orgs, engineering leadership vs. product leadership, the value of repeating yourself, finding the team members who can help share context across your company, what it means to stay focused as you scale, and being effective in the face of great uncertainty.Ep 11
Jul 05, 2023 • 53 minBuilding Developer Experiences at Slack, with Steve Gill
Steve Gill, Slack’s Director of DevRel Engineering, digs in to the craft of building great APIs for developers. We discuss the power of open source for informing platform work, building platforms that developers will actually use, the tricky issues around building and supporting SDKs, the concept of “raccooning” at Slack, how Slack’s new composable apps enable a whole new category of app, and the importance of saying “no” when a new feature isn’t working out.Ep 10
Jun 13, 2023 • 48 minPrincipal Engineering at AWS Scale, with Nik Pinski
Nik Pinski, Principal Engineer at AWS, shares how AWS is organized for autonomy and customer-centric product development, dealing with millions of events per second, and how Staff and Principal Engineer career tracks work across different software organizations.Ep 9
May 17, 2023 • 47 minScaling a UX Org from 30 to 450, with Shopify’s former Head of Design Kyle Peatt
Kyle Peatt, former Head of Design at Shopify, shares lessons he learned helping rapidly scale Shopify’s UX team from 30 folks to 450. We talk about effective triads of product, design, and engineering leadership; building a UX organization without becoming a matrix org; the concept of UX Leads that manage folks from front-end engineering through design and content strategy; what makes a Staff Designer; and the importance of having an opinion in design leadership.Ep 8
Apr 26, 2023 • 56 minEffective and Scalable Machine Learning, with Opendoor Co-Founder Ian Wong
Ian Wong, co-founder of Opendoor, shares what he’s learned about machine learning and data science in his work as CTO of Opendoor and helping detect fraud at Square. We talk about the differences between descriptive and predictive ML, approaches to human-in-the-loop prediction, setting up a data science org to deliver real business impact, why so many internal tooling projects fail, and how leaders should be dividing their attention between top-level strategy and the details that really matter.Ep 7
Apr 05, 2023 • 46 minArchitecting Apps at Netflix Scale, with Arik Devens
Netflix’s Arik Devens shares what he’s learned about architecting mobile apps with many millions of users, building from early adventures at Netscape and Palm up to architectural roles at Fitbit and Netflix. We talk about Netflix’s culture of small, high-trust teams; some of the pathologies of very large engineering teams; how to sell new architectural patterns to a team working on a large existing codebase; and the challenges of A/B testing hundreds of millions of users.Ep 6
Mar 17, 2023 • 56 minMaking Billions with Ethical Onboarding, with Jaycee Day
Jaycee Day, a seasoned designer having worked at GitHub and Blinkist, shares what she learned designing a now world-famous app onboarding flow. We talk about onboarding flows, subscription and trial mechanics in apps, the tensions between ethics and short-term profiteering, the business model of mobile games, and A/B testing.Ep 5
Feb 15, 2023 • 41 minSolving Engineering Problems with DuckDuckGo’s Cate Huston
Cate Huston shares what she’s learned leading engineering teams at DuckDuckGo, Automattic, and Google. We talk about the challenges of hiring directors, what makes DuckDuckGo weird, supporting team happiness vs. team effectiveness, the quagmire of trying to measure team velocity, and the tradeoffs inherent in cross-platform app development.Ep 4
Jan 20, 2023 • 39 minEffectively Leading Technical Teams, with Khan Academy’s Shawn Jansepar
Shawn Jansepar, Director of Engineering at Khan Academy, shares what he’s learned about keeping product teams engaged, effective engineering practices and how to teach them, and building trust.Ep 3
Dec 28, 2022 • 41 minLessons Learned Building Alexa, with Product Manager Polly Allen
Polly Allen, former Principal Product Manager on Amazon Alexa, shares what she’s learned about the challenging world of building products for voice and AI, as well the roles of data-driven decision-making and computing science education in product leadership.Ep 2
Dec 07, 2022 • 43 minHow Not to Ship Your Org Chart, with veteran product designer Brad Ellis
Brad Ellis pulls from his experience designing for Square, Lyft, and many other products to share what he’s learned about the incredible value of user testing, scaling product design across a large org, and how to make great experiences instead of shipping your org chart.Ep 1
Nov 16, 2022 • 58 min