From early days to IPO: Scaling leadership, enterprise growth, product ownership, & outgrowing your failure modes w/ Jon Hyman #215
The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Navigating Management Evolution
This chapter explores the transformation of management practices in a tech startup as it grows, highlighting the importance of effective personnel decisions and leadership vision. It addresses the challenges of maintaining clarity and motivation through the transition to public company status, while emphasizing the need for measurable goals to drive long-term success.
Jon Hyman (Co-Founder and CTO @ Braze) shares the pivotal moments that shaped the company - from being the only person on call in the early years to identifying (and pivoting) product-market fit. Jon discusses how they navigated early-stage failure modes, carved out areas of product ownership, and made the shift to enterprise customers. Plus how leadership priorities evolve pre- vs. post-IPO and the next evolution of Jon’s leadership growth after almost 14 years at Braze.
ABOUT JON HYMAN
Jon Hyman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Braze, the customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, in-app, and more. He leads the charge for building the platform’s technical systems and infrastructure as well as overseeing the company’s technical operations and engineering team.
Prior to Braze, Jon served as lead engineer for the Core Technology group at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. There, he managed a team that maintained 80+ software assets and was responsible for the security and stability of critical trading systems. Jon met cofounder Bill Magnuson during his time at Bridgewater, and together they won the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Jon is a recipient of the SmartCEO Executive Management Award in the CIO/CTO Category for New York. Jon holds a B.A. from Harvard University in Computer Science.
ABOUT BRAZE
Braze is the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging.™ Braze allows any marketer to collect and take action on any amount of data from any source, so they can creatively engage with customers in real time, across channels from one platform. From cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration to Al-powered experimentation and optimization, Braze enables companies to build and maintain absolutely engaging relationships with their customers that foster growth and loyalty. The company has been recognized as a 2024 U.S. News & World Report Best Companies to Work For, 2024 Best Small & Medium Workplaces in Europe by Great Place to Work®, 2024 Fortune Best Workplaces for Women™ by Great Place to Work® and was named a Leader by Gartner® in the 2024 Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs and a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q3 2024. Braze is headquartered in New York with 15 offices across North America, Europe, and APAC. Learn more at braze.com.
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SHOW NOTES:
- What Jon learned from being the only person on call for his company’s first four years (2:56)
- Knowing when it’s time to get help managing your servers, ops, scaling, etc. (5:42)
- Establishing areas of product ownership & other scaling lessons from the early days (9:25)
- Frameworks for conversations on splitting of products across teams (12:00)
- The challenges, complexities & strategies behind assigning ownership in the early days (14:40)
- Founding Braze (18:01)
- Why Braze? The story & insights behind the original vision for Braze (20:08)
- Identifying Braze’s product market fit (22:34)
- Early-stage PMF challenges faced by Jon & his co-founders (25:40)
- Pivoting to focus on enterprise customers (27:48)
- “Let’s integrate the SDK right now” - founder-led sales ideas to validate your product (29:22)
- Behind the decision to hire a chief revenue officer for the first time (34:02)
- The evolution of enterprise & its impact on Braze’s product offering (36:42)
- Growing out of your early-stage failure modes (39:00)
- Why it’s important to make personnel decisions quickly (41:22)
- Setting & maintaining a vision pre IPO vs. post IPO (44:21)
- Jon’s next leadership evolution & growth areas he is focusing on (49:50)
- Rapid fire questions (52:53)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
- When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut’s fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
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