What if your engineering team didn’t just write code, but owned product discovery, wrote the launch messaging, and handled early sales? In this episode, Michael Grinich, CEO and founder of WorkOS, deconstructs their playbook for collapsing the product/engineering stack: no design leads, only one PM, and engineers who own product end-to-end. Michael breaks down how they teach product thinking, build with deep customer insight, and why his most important job is often to "cut scope." You’ll learn how to remove the "lossy translation layers" between teams, build a culture of curiosity and customer obsession, and ship higher-quality products, faster.
Michael is the founder and CEO of WorkOS, a developer platform that enables companies to become Enterprise Ready through features like Single Sign-On (SAML). Their customers include many of the fastest-growing startups including Webflow, Drata, Loom, and +200 others. Before WorkOS, Michael co-founded Nylas and studied CS at MIT.
ToolHive Unlocks the Full Value of MCP & Your AI Agents
So you’ve invested in AI agents for code generation, but they’re limited to experiments or even stuck on the shelf. To do real, valuable work, those AI agents need access to your data and systems.
ToolHive helps you confidently connect the pieces by making it simple and secure for you to use the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
ToolHive includes a pre-vetted registry of MCP servers, containerizes every MCP server for consistency and leans on built-in security to keep your secrets safe.
Leaders trust ToolHive to put MCP into production and put their AI agents to work.
ToolHive is open source, so get started for free at toolhive.dev
Join us at ELC Annual 2025
ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!
SHOW NOTES:
- Marketing technical products exclusively to other tech companies (2:39)
- Building products end-to-end without PMs (6:36)
- How WorkOS utilizes fun, user feedback, and cohesive storytelling in their product-building process (9:31)
- Hiring engineers for curiosity & comfort operating in ambiguity (12:48)
- How engineers owning product discovery & directly engaging w/ users improve product insights (16:31)
- Using Slack for real-time integrated support & rapid product iteration (19:38)
- The complexities of creating simple, elegant products and marketing messaging (21:54)
- Cut scope ruthlessly to ship faster and better (26:20)
- Small, simple, deeply useful features make the biggest impact (30:30)
- The weekly cadence that keeps engineering aligned (32:52)
- Behind the scenes of MCP Night: A protocol party for devs (38:20)
- Rapid fire questions (41:29)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
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/
The Engineering Leadership Podcast 