Roland Martin: I think one of the interesting things when you're building much more of a platform product, versus kind of a piece of vertical sass or a piece of sassofor that's sold to salespeople. He says figuring out how you get someone into the product is significantly harder because the jobs to be done are so much more broad. The place where these segments differentiate is really, again, how they operationalize retool.Martin: We do definitionally have to alocate a meaningful part of our engineering team toward understanding what retool looks like at scale b for that hundred thousand user base. But i would say it's almost like a one way door in the sense that
Today’s episode is with Snir Kodesh, Head of Engineering at Retool, which is a development platform for building custom business tools. Before joining Retool, Snir spent six years as a Senior Director of Engineering at Lyft.
In our conversation, we cover some of the biggest differences between leading engineering teams for a consumer product versus an enterprise platform — and the things that are consistent across both orgs.
First, Snir pulls back the curtain on the software development cycle, starting with setting the product roadmap while balancing a diverse set of customer needs. He outlines who’s in the room to represent product, engineering and design, and what those meetings actually look and sound like.
Next, he dives into how engineering actually starts taking that product roadmap and making a plan of action using the “try, do, consider” framework. He makes the case for leaning on QBRs instead of OKRs, why scope creep gets a bad rap, and his advice for getting better at estimating how long a feature will actually take to complete.
Finally, we zoom out and cover his essential advice for engineering leaders — especially folks who are scaling quickly from leading a small team to a much bigger one.
You can follow Snir on Twitter at @snirkodesh
You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson