It Shipped That Way

Impeccable creator Paul Bakaus shares lessons learned turning a coding harness into a design harness, building ambitious agent skills, getting compelling design from AI, keeping up with slop, and amplifying human craft.<ul> <li><a href="https://impeccable.style/">Impeccable</a></li> <li><a href="https://impeccable.pro/">Impeccable Pro</a></li> <li>The Impeccable <a href="https://impeccable.style/slop/">slop catalog</a></li> <li><a href="https://x.com/pbakaus/status/2077114326985687525">The Dark Arts of Skill Engineering</a> talk</li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Wealthsimple Co-Founder and CPO Brett Huneycutt shares lessons from building a 1500-person company recently valued at $10B. He relates the underlying wisdom of “Launch now”, how early dogfooding and short cycle times increase both speed and quality, attention to detail as a brand promise, where product decisions should be taste-driven vs. data-driven, and how to hire people you would want to work for.<ul> <li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/zokVUFCJzMo">Wealthsimple Presents: The End of Banking</a> on YouTube</li> <li><a href="https://x.com/bretthuneycutt">Brett Huneycutt on X</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Zapier’s first PM and now VP of Product Chris Geoghegan joins us to discuss the relationship between deterministic and LLM-powered automations, scaling a transparent and fully-remote company from millions in revenue to hundreds of millions, whether PM roles are becoming more or less important today, disrupting yourself before anybody else does, and the value of knowing SQL.<ul> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisgeoghegan/">Chris Geoghegan</a> on LinkedIn</li> <li><a href="https://maven.com/p/0a96cb/cursor-isn-t-just-for-coding-how-ai-native-p-ms-work">Cursor for PMs course</a> from Tal Raviv</li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Jane App Co-Founder & Co-CEO Trevor Johnston shares lessons from building a vertical SaaS that now serves hundreds of thousands of clinicians worldwide. We discuss the geometric power of referrals, obsessing over churn, turning your customers into your salespeople, scaling product engineering past Dunbar’s number, transcending a Rails monolith, and finding the fun in 6 hours of Zoom meetings.<ul> <li><a href="https://jane.app">Jane App</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Lorilyn McCue, head of AI product at Superhuman, joins to share what she’s learned building LLM-powered products. She talks about how Superhuman executes on shipping delightful software, how to pursue both attention to detail and rapid iteration, optimizing your roadmap for learning, questions that are surprisingly easy (and hard) for LLMs, evaluation and testing of AI-powered features, and ruthlessly prioritizing the user.<ul> <li>The <a href="https://blog.superhuman.com/">Superhuman Blog</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Milun Tesovic, founder of Metrolyrics, Cmd, and Gitalytics – and now Parter at Expa – shares lessons learned building startups. We talk about building the largest lyrics site in the world, turning organizational dysfunction into startup ideas, solving problems without making people change their behaviour, getting acquired by Github a month after launch, making early hires on a product team, and how to get a great domain with one weird trick.<ul> <li><a href="https://expa.com/">expa.com</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

The Browser Company’s Head Of Engineering, Dolapo Falola, shares lessons from Google, Facebook, and Slack, and how they’ve informed his leadership of the team building Arc. He shares about the rush to launch Stories at Meta, reinventing the browser with Arc, finding work that energizes people vs. finding people energized by the work, “working out loud” for velocity, the challenge of bringing Arc to Windows, rewarding complexity vs. business impact, and playing the long game to hire exceptional talent.<ul> <li><a href="https://dolapo.io/">dolapo.io</a></li> <li><a href="https://arc.net/">The Arc Browser</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Cate Huston joins to talk about her new book, The Engineering Leader. She shares why she wrote a book, leadership problems endemic to fast-growing organizations, why career growth is more than promotions, coachability, levelling up your hiring pipeline, how hiring “bars” can go wrong, and why energy management matters more than time management.<ul> <li><a href="https://www.itshipped.fm/episodes/4">It Shipped Ep. 4 with Cate Huston</a></li> <li>Cate’s new book, <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-engineering-leader/9781098154059/">The Engineering Leader</a></li> <li><a href="http://cate.blog">cate.blog</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Johnny Rodgers, one of Slack’s founding engineers, shares stories and lessons from building Slack. He shares Slack’s origin, the art of extreme responsiveness to customer feedback, how features like threads and reacji came together, Slack’s positioning and north star, product-led growth as a path to building startups, and how to have an outsized impact in a scaling organization.<ul> <li><a href="https://johnnyrodgers.is/">johnnyrodgers.is</a></li> <li><a href="https://buildingslack.com/">buildingslack.com</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.

Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, joins to share lessons from her popular and acclaimed book. We talk about the benefits of constantly talking to customers, why it can be worth seeking delight rather than strictly building products in terms of problems, how to avoid choosing perverse outcomes and metrics, and how to get the truth from customers – despite their aspirational overconfidence.<ul> <li><a href="https://www.producttalk.org/">ProductTalk.org</a></li> <li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresatorres/">Teresa on LinkedIn</a></li> </ul> Have feedback for the show? Send an email or message to Allen any time. It Shipped That Way is supported by Steamclock Software and Powerplant.