It Shipped That Way

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 Forestwalk Labs.

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 Forestwalk Labs.

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 Forestwalk Labs.

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 Forestwalk Labs.

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 Forestwalk Labs.

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 Forestwalk Labs.

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 Forestwalk Labs.

Luke Hutscal, Principal Engineer at Clio – formerly of Shopify and Testflight – joins to talk about finding ways to learn rapidly, the downsides of a mercenary mindset, spending time with people who intimidate you, building a coaching village, making wrong things look wrong, choosing boring technology, resume-driven development, and putting in the reps to get great at hiring.<ul> <li><a href="http://lukehutscal.com/">Luke Hutscal</a></li> <li><a href="https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology">Choose boring technology</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 Forestwalk Labs.

James Clift, Founder and CEO of Durable and VisualCV, joins us to talk about helping folks build great businesses, staying long-term optimistic yet short-term pessimistic, choosing between exciting ideas vs. clearly profitable ones, the distraction of “fake work”, getting good at rapidly trying and killing ideas, lessons learned from two years of building on LLMs, and the longevity of non-chat workflows.<ul> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/jamesclift">@jamesclift on Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="https://durable.co/">Durable</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 Forestwalk Labs.

Eric Amodio, creator of GitLens, GitKraken CTO, and former Principal Engineer on VS Code, joins us to talk about founding products by scratching your own itch, building GitLens from an idea to tens of millions of users, the audacity of charging for software, the origins of github.dev and Copilot at Microsoft, LLMs as a new layer of abstraction for developers, and how GitKraken is helping engineers understand large codebases faster.<ul> <li><a href="https://www.gitkraken.com/">GitKraken</a></li> <li><a href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=eamodio.gitlens">GitLens</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 Forestwalk Labs.