It Shipped That Way: Recent Episodes
Steamclock Software
An interview series featuring product leaders in tech about the lessons they've learned building great products and teams. Hosted by Allen Pike of Steamclock, new episodes every 3 weeks.
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.* Ridwell * Aliya’s LinkedIn * Do Something, So We Can Change It!
Have feedback for the show? Send us an email or reach out on Twitter. It Shipped That Way is brought to you by Steamclock Software.
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.* Later and Mavrck * Ian on Twitter and Threads
Have feedback for the show? Send us an email or reach out on Twitter. It Shipped That Way is brought to you by Steamclock Software.
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.* Backbone Angels * Lynsey on LinkedIn * Lara Hogan on the BICEPS framework
Have feedback for the show? Send us an email or reach out on Twitter. It Shipped That Way is brought to you by Steamclock Software.
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.* Bruce on Mastodon * Bruce on Twitter * warpedvisions.org
Have feedback for the show? Send us an email or reach out on Twitter. It Shipped That Way is brought to you by Steamclock Software.
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.* Slack’s new API * stevesgill on Twitter
Have feedback for the show? Send us an email or reach out on Twitter. It Shipped That Way is brought to you by Steamclock Software.
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.