Career Journey 4: Product-Led & Customer-Obsessed
Plus, how engineers created Threads, a hot take on static typing, Stack Overflow takes another shot at AI, free DORA metrics, and more.
Good news! We’re giving away two free tickets to Plato Elevate: The no-bs conference for engineering leaders!
To win free tickets to Plato Elevate, please provide your details here!
We’ll select and email the winners on Oct 20th—in the meantime, you can get discount tickets here.
In a world where products are plentiful but genuine customer focus is rare, how do you build an engineering org focused on customer needs?
Embark on the 4th chapter of our series on the Career Journey of Engineering Leaders as Dev Interrupted host Dan Lines sits down with the talented Bhavini Soneji. With a wealth of experience spanning over 25 years and pivotal roles at places like Headspace, Heal, and Microsoft, Bhavini has meticulously honed her approach to creating engineering orgs that prioritize both product innovation and a deep-rooted customer focus.
Listen as Dan and Bhavini unravel what it truly means to be “customer-obsessed” and the secrets to maintaining fervent customer passion well beyond a product's launch.
“For me, customer obsession means a relentless commitment to solving customer problems and providing delightful experiences.
It's all about understanding the customer's pain points, desires, and needs so deeply that then you can use those insights to drive the execution towards business outcomes.”
Episode Highlights:
(3:30) What does it mean to be customer-obsessed?
(5:00) Fostering a culture of customer obsession
(12:00) Aligning KPIs
(19:00) Translating business goals to the eng team
(23:00) The importance of resource allocation
(30:00) Sustaining customer obsession after product launch
(37:00) Bhavini’s advice for engineering leaders
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
*NEW* Check out The Download’s Engineering Events section at the bottom of this email for the in-person and online events worth your time.
1. See How Threads Got Built
Whether you use it or you don’t, you have to admit that the launch of Threads was damn impressive. The microblogging app recorded an unprecedented 100M downloads within five days due to effective promotion among Instagram’s 2 billion active users and taking advantage of Twitter's limitations on post views for free users.
In this piece by
, we get an inside look at how the Threads engineering team, comprised mainly of senior engineers transferred internally, worked with a lean and flat organizational structure to expedite decision-making processes, developing the app discreetly and swiftly in five months by heavily relying on Instagram’s tech stack and Meta’s existing infrastructure.2. Have an opinion on “Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on…”
You know what’s been missing from the engineering landscape? Hot takes.
Enter: Tom Hacohen.
Tom advocates for strong static typing in software development, asserting that it leads to less bugs and enhances the development experience. Strong typing, Tom suggests, provides clear contracts between different code sections, reducing the need for extensive documentation and making the codebase more comprehensible and navigable for developers.
While acknowledging that not using types may speed up the initial development process, Tom warns that this approach can lead to significant issues down the line, likening it to driving "full speed towards a cliff."
Read: Strong Static Typing, A Hill I'm Willing To Die On…
Get On The Waitlist For Free DORA Metrics For Life
With a free LinearB account, you’ll get all four DORA metrics right out of the box. No limitations on contributors, repos, or team size.
Here’s what’s included:
All four DORA metrics — Cycle Time, Deploy Frequency, CFR, MTTR
Industry-standard Benchmarks to help you define team performance and set data-backed goals
Additional leading metrics, including Merge Frequency
and Pull Request Size (a great indicator of quality and efficiency)
3. Read Stack Overflow’s AI Clap Back
No company has faced the immediate repercussions of AI quite like Stack Overflow. And a rebuttal from the company is long overdue.
The author illustrates, through career anecdotes, how the gravest software development challenges often stem from ambiguous or incorrect requirements rather than coding errors.
While AI excels at tasks with clear, finite parameters (like chess), creating software is more akin to driving, where judgment calls are essential and variables are infinite.
Read: The Hardest Part Of Building Software Isn’t Coding, It's Requirements
4. Learn The Dos & Don’ts Of Launching Your Own AI Tool
One of the best things about Honeycomb.io is that its engineering leadership isn’t shy about speaking their minds. The latest installment in this tradition is the company opening up about the success and failure of their first experiment in AI.
Query Assistant, a feature designed to assist new users in formulating queries in Honeycomb's data platform, has shown mixed success since its rapid development and release. While adoption rates and retention are positive, especially among paying customers, they haven’t reached expected levels, particularly among free-tier users.
The article suggests that to optimize the value of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Query Assistant, teams should release early, iterate rapidly based on user data, and use Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to monitor changes and ensure that enhancements do not compromise existing functionality.
Read: So We Shipped An AI Product. Did It Work?
5. DORA Metrics Now Free For All
We know it’s been hard for our friends at LinearB to keep the lid on the fact that they were launching DORA metrics for free.
Now, the news is officially out: quantitative DORA metrics dashboards are free for any company that wants them, and DevOps.com spoke with LinearB CEO Ori Keren about why they took this step.
Read: LinearB to Provide Free DORA Metrics Dashboard
6. Thanks for saying hi!
We had a fantastic time at DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas last week, recording 15 incredible conversations and talking to so many of you in person.
Thank you to everyone who stopped by and said hi; it's great to hear from you! Looking forward to seeing more of you at LeadDev/LeadingEng SF next week.
Our Upcoming Events
Plato Elevate
The No-BS conference for engineering leaders | November 7-8 | San Francisco, CA
Highlights: Dev Interrupted readers get discounted tickets for Plato through this link.
Navigating the biggest change to the tech industry in a generation | October 16-17 | San Francisco, CA
Highlights: The Dev Interrupted Team will be on-site each day of the conference, recording live podcast episodes. Come say hello; we’d love to meet you!
December 4-5 | Berlin, Germany
Highlights: Conference themes include: 1) Skills for leading in a downturn; 2) Doing more with less; 3) Preparation techniques for change; and 4) Crafting agile, ambitious, and achievable workflows.