Exploring Team Dynamics and Growth in Product Development

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Team dynamics and growth in product development involve distributing team members across different product areas to enhance focus and efficiency initially with a smaller team. A small team benefits from better communication, minimized errors, and reduced need for formal processes and testing due to everyone's awareness of activities. As the team and code base grow, challenges like increased complexity, reduced awareness of coupling, and regression issues arise, leading to the necessity of robust test suites over time. Starting with a smaller team on a new product helps avoid building unnecessary features, reducing complexity, and preventing the creation of code that adds no value. Slowly scaling the team based on necessity and pain points is seen as a beneficial strategy in building new products.

All robust technology platforms require testing to ensure that features work as intended. In many cases, tests require data, but getting access to valid and high quality test data is a common challenge, especially when the technology runs on sensitive data. Realistically mimicking data that would normally contain sensitive financial or personal information is not easy.

Tonic.ai was started in 2018 to provide developer tools to transform production data into safe testing data. Andrew Colombi is the CTO and Adam Kamor is the Head of Engineering at Tonic. They join the show to talk about creating realistic synthetic data, data de-identification, validating LLM RAG output, Tonic’s subsetting engine, and much more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Tonic.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk.