Happy Paths

Building a product for a broad target market is hard. Even harder if your competitors are entrenched corporations. Even harder than that? Having a few dozen employees while competitors employ thousands. This week’s guest, Koyfin’s Rob Koyfman, does it anyway—and succeeds at it. Listen to find out how Koyfin — a trading analysis platform adopted by professional traders and individuals — builds an i...

On this episode of Happy Paths: Dani Grant from Jam. Dev, a bug reporting tool that’s used by over 30,000 people and that you’ve probably seen on Twitter. We cover: The origins of Jam: how Dani’s time at Cloudflare shaped her thinking on how to build a small, nimble team. Jam’s superpower: a software development lifecycle that keeps them dogfooding and shipping fast Thriving remote: Clever tactics...

It might be hard to believe, but smartphone notifications are a fairly new phenomenon, at least as we know them today, constant notifications for every app on your phone unless you turn them off. When iOS and Android first became popular, you'd really only get three types of regular notifications: a new email, a new voicemail, or a missed phone call. With the invention of push notifications, mobil...

Project management is one of the largest categories in all of software. From side hustles to huge multinational corporations, teams of all sizes use project management tools to plan and execute their work. And the number of tools in the market for project management is as diverse as the people that use them: Jira, Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp, and many others. Each brings its own unique spin on how...

Augmented reality combines computer-generated virtual elements with the real world. Unlike virtual reality, AR enhances a person's perception of the real world instead of replacing it entirely. Snap, the company behind Snapchat, recognized the potential of AR early on. In 2015, they released Lenses, which have been one of the most popular features of the product ever since. In their S-1 document f...

Every software company needs to announce new features…and some of us pay more attention to these announcements than others. Sometimes, a feature announcement catches our attention, and it's often because of a well-designed graphic. Diógenes Brito has first-hand knowledge about this as the Head of Product and Design at Air. He's well-known for his work as a product designer at Slack, where he added...

Twitter wasn't the first company to get traction with a social audio product, but it quickly became a leader in the space, in no small part thanks to the work of Maya Gold Patterson, who was the Lead Product Designer for Twitter Spaces through its launch and early growth. In this episode, James talks with Maya about her experience helping build Twitter Spaces, how to learn from competitors' launch...

What do TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have in common? It's the hashtag: invented by a man of the internet, Chris Messina. Throughout his career, Chris has worked on movements online and offline that have helped define social media and social technology broadly. If you've used Firefox, attended a BarCamp event, or even checked in at a co-working space, then you're more than familiar with...

Email has been around for decades, and many people now spend hours reading, writing, and replying to emails every day. Since being founded in 2014, Superhuman has become the most revered email client in existence for people who write a lot of email. There are so many useful chapters from the Superhuman story. James sat down with Gaurav Vohra, who has led product and growth as part of Superhuman's...

Gmail is one of the most used pieces of software ever, with 1.8 billion users today. In many ways, Gmail defined modern email, transitioning us from the "You've Got Mail" era into the present. Pretty much everyone has used Gmail or another email client that's been inspired by Gmail. James talks with Gmail's creator, Paul Buchheit, to learn more about how what he built came to be the juggernaut of...

Happy Paths, a series from CommandBar, explores the human process behind some of the most well-known software of the internet era. In each episode, host James Evans dives deep on one iconic product or feature — like Gmail, the hashtag, or Twitter Spaces — with the people who built them. We will pull back the curtain on the little details of how they were made, giving context for our audience on wh...