Meticulous

So, about dinner last night... ?? Julianna Lamb and I co-hosted an engineering leaders dinner on behalf of her team at Stytch and our team at Orb alongside guests from Bardeen, MongoDB, Pinecone, Log10.io, Sybill, DeepScribe, meez, Census, Pocus. Here's what was top of mind: 1?? We broke the ice talking about production incident stories, as always. There were some good ones - near data loss, versioning protobufs, and staging coming to the rescue. It's encouraging to see how much a team can come together when these issues happen -- says a lot about the talent you've built! 2?? There was a lot of discussion around product management in early companies - what's the right stage to hire your first PM, and how do you balance the founder vision with PM strategy? Despite lots of differing opinions on this, everyone agreed that a great PM is able to exercise pointed and often non-concensus intuition to advocate for specific product investments. 3?? Quality assurance in software is a hot topic - it certainly seems that the days of pure MVPs are gone, especially in B2B enterprise software. Strategies here ranged from manual outsourced full-time QA to a battery of automated, property-based tests. My sense is that there's a lot more framework to develop here (and I admire folks like Meticulous who are pushing the boundaries!). 4?? When the conversation turned to favorite vendors, Fullstory, Twingate, and Conveyor came up. It's always fun and a bit counter-intuitive to see how many times a 'favorite vendor' involves lots of excellent customer support. Durable trust is still built in these interactions! 5?? I suspect that the areas of cloud economics and cost management are still a severely under-invested-in area for most companies. We discussed several stories on both sides: teams racking up $100K+ bills over a weekend from a cloud provider, to having to shape their internal architectures to support free tiers and cost management for customers over optimizing performance. This is an area where I'm particularly excited to see Orb's features around spend caps/alerting make a dent. Thank you again to Ram Sriharsha, Artem H., Niklas Quarfot Nielsen, Parth Shah, Nikrad Mahdi, Brad Buda, Aniruddha, and Ujwal Bachiraju for joining us!

We'll be hosting an open bar at the Old Red Cow pub next to the Barbican tomorrow night (11th June, 5pm to 10pm). Come pop by if you’re curious about?Meticulous.ai?(exhaustive frontend coverage without writing or maintaining a single test) or just to catch up over a drink. If you know anyone going to LeadDev please forward this on to them (we're a 5 minute walk away).

We'll be hosting an open bar at the Old Red Cow pub next to the Barbican tomorrow night (11th June, 5pm to 10pm). Come pop by if you’re curious about?Meticulous.ai?(exhaustive frontend coverage without writing or maintaining a single test) or just to catch up over a drink. If you know anyone going to LeadDev please forward this on to them (we're a 5 minute walk away).