Building a Product Org.wav

Speakers: Paul Rogers (CTO at EquipmentShare & Venture Partner at Next Coast Ventures)

Key Points

• What matters for building early stage tech stacks? It’s easy to start with monolithic platforms (e.g. Ruby on Rails), but when you are scaling you will want to replace that with micro services. If you have a very talented team it is most likely better to start with micro services. Monolithic platforms can be good because they are so easy to iterate on.
• What are core principles with choosing a tech stack? You want to be lazy/thoughtful as possible not spending time polishing rocks or optimizing prematurely. You want to use a stack that you can continue reusing and iterating on not something that is constantly being customized. Use tools that have more support in the dev community.
• Hiring your first technical founder or employee what do you do? Understand what the candidates have actually built and what they actually did with leading a team. A flag would be someone talking about how perfect they have done everything. Most engineers are self aware and they need to talk about what they have done wrong and how they fixed those errors.
• If a founder is technical and does it all what does that path look like? Don’t stop doing what you love as long as it is productive for the team and business. There is a path to continue coding and building products if you bring in an operator. Go with what feels natural and where the greatest/need satisfaction is.
• When do you start caring about DevOps? A strong core team of 6 members can own code and DevOps for a while. It becomes important when there is complex testing automation, too much time being spent on infrastructure, and the level of quality you are maintaining in your code. Definitely create a DevOps culture is great and be thinking about automation at all time. A good book on DevOps is the Google SRE handbook. Accelerate is a great book on management, team culture, and data to improve the business. Elegant Puzzle is a good book if you are planning to go from 5-30 people. It is a walk through of being a manager and leader in a hyper growth environment.
• Cliff notes on using a devshop? Early days, using a team off shore is normal. You have to have very strong management and project management to manage an outside team. Sometimes offshore teams can even be more engaged than local teams. (Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe, and South America are good areas and red flags are with India & China). The best way to approach hiring devshops is through staff augmentation. Give the offshore teams small parts of the product and let them grow into it to where they are maintaining the platform once it is built.