It Shipped That Way

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...

Nikki 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.<ul> <li><a href="https://staffeng.com/">staffeng.com</a></li> <li><a href="https:...

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 Desi...

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 leader...

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 existin...

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.<ul> <li> <p>Jaycee’s website, <a href="https:/...

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.<ul> <li><a href="https://cate.blog/&q...

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.<ul> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jansepar/">Shawn Jansepar on LinkedIn</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/">Khan Acad...

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.<ul> <li>Polly is <a href="https://twitter.com/yukonpolly">@yukonpolly on Twitter</a> and is also <a hre...

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. Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software...