Engineering teams that put their customers first

Our mission is to put patients in control of their own health [records]. Everything we do is patient-centric.

We are here to improve everyone's health by unlocking the power of good medical data. An individual patient who has access to their personal medical data can receive better and higher quality care. We go one step further: PicnicHealth gives patients the opportunity to contribute to the leading research on their specific disease area. We’ve established over a dozen partnerships with life sciences companies (including 7 of the top 10 biopharma in the US) to advance science and develop breakthroughs in treatments. When we give voice to our collective medical journey, by making our records available together, we accelerate research and access to treatments for all.

With full consent from our users (we are always transparent and protect our patients’ privacy), we de-identify and share medical record data that is valuable to commercial and non-commercial research. For example, we partnered with Genentech to create FlywheelMS, a research study that aims to get a clearer picture of how and why multiple sclerosis (MS) impacts different people in different ways. Users sign up with PicnicHealth (we waive the fee for 5 years) and consent to sharing their anonymous data. Putting all of this information together for a diverse group of MS patients will allow researchers to see patterns that no one doctor can see on their own.

We are obsessed with building a solution that patients actually find useful (check out our demo!) – and doing it in a way that puts patients at the center. Since we are all patients ourselves, we make sure we are building a product that we trust with our own medical records. We believe that leading with our patient-centered values of transparency, data privacy, and full patient control will deepen the trust that patients have in PicnicHealth.

Everything we do is customer-centric.

As a young child, our CEO and co-founder, Jamie, experienced firsthand how important life insurance is when his father passed away unexpectedly. Thanks to his dad’s planning, his family was able to have financial stability during one of the hardest periods of their lives. At Ladder, we’re on a mission to make life insurance easy, accessible, and empowering with a digital solution. Given the importance of this real-world issue, it’s safe to say that our customers are at the heart of everything we do. In other words, we’re not building for building’s sake. Engineers are encouraged to ask questions, such as “what are we solving for and how does it impact users?” to understand what the higher level intent is behind every decision.

Our roadmap is directly informed by customer needs. For instance, we wanted to reward customers who have healthy lifestyles, and thus a lower mortality risk. This led us to create an iOS App where customers can sync their steps and get a discount for living an active lifestyle.

We also extensively use FullStory, a tool that provides videos of how our customers are interacting with our product. These are shared in our #fullstory Slack channel, where engineers can gain valuable insight into what’s working well, improve pain points, and catch bugs before they become bigger problems. In addition to assigning different engineers to various FullStory videos every day, we also do quarterly week-long on-call rotations so engineers are never far from our end users.

We call our customers our guests and strive to improve their experience with every decision we make.

Our guests are often the people ordering food for their entire family or folks who want to mix-and-match across a wide array of cuisines. Every decision we make starts with the guest experience in mind and we prioritize based on their needs. We hold true to this even at moments when it's uncomfortable for us personally or our operations. That might mean personally delivering an order to ensure it makes it on time, answering a support email at midnight, or staying open on Christmas Eve. We do this because we know that delivering a world-class, reliable, and convenient experience will distinguish us in the market.

We solicit feedback from every order and all engineers and co-founders read every single sentence of guest feedback. We respond to every Yelp review and reply to 90% of our support requests in <1 minute. Engineers interact with guests weekly via email or for user research in-store or over Zoom. Last but not least, once a month, everyone in the company signs up for a shift as a greeter in one of our locations and writes up their insights from the experience. It would be easier to sit at our desk and code. However, as we bring our technical backgrounds to the food industry, we must also prioritize the human experience. By keeping a tight feedback loop with our customers, we ensure that we’re building the best product that serves them.

We go to great lengths to understand the needs of our customers.

AngelList Venture exists to fuel more innovation in the world. We’re doing so by disrupting the venture capital industry and opening up a previously inaccessible asset class to a significantly wider set of people. In 2019, we spun out AngelList Venture into a separate company from AngelList to work on this problem and have since massively scaled up our core investing platform and launched several new products. These products include a new way for VCs to raise money, a new way for startups to provide liquidity for employees, and a new way for investors to have a diversified portfolio of high-quality deals and funds.

Focusing on our customers’ needs has helped us launch and scale quickly. We’re privileged to have a network of former founders and investors who are always sharing feedback and ideating with our team. We host UXR sessions (that engineers are welcome and encouraged to attend!) multiple times a week, where we solicit product feedback and listen to suggestions for improvement.

Render is a cloud platform built by software developers for software developers.

We’re solving a problem we’re intimately familiar with, giving our product and business a unique edge. Traditionally, when deploying applications in production, developers are forced to pick between two extremes: expensive yet simplistic platforms, or complicated, do-it-all-yourself services. Instead, Render takes care of all the laborious work upfront, minimizing the amount of thinking, reading, and clicking Render customers need to do. This makes it easy to get up and running quickly while simultaneously allowing applications to scale and increase in complexity over time, preventing a transition to DIY infrastructure. For example, during the height of the pandemic, many high-growth startups relied on Render to address rapidly changing business needs. And when Heroku ended its free tier, we made it easier than ever to migrate apps over to Render. We’re giving precious time back to our customers so they can focus on what really matters to their business. This clear product-market fit has enabled us to scale quickly – with over 10.5B requests served monthly and 1M+ services created; we’re not slowing down.

We rely heavily on customer feedback and treat Render customers the way we'd like to be treated. We read every tweet, respond to questions from our community, and keep track of what our users need to be successful on Render. Moreover, all our full-stack engineers participate in on-call and support engineering rotations. Customer service is core to UX and a big differentiator in a crowded market like ours.

We dogfood our own platform daily and always look to make our customers’ lives better.

Sales and marketing teams look to Qualified to modernize and optimize their approach to a process that is most critical to their companies’ success – generating new business. With our conversational marketing tool, companies can identify and instantly engage with valuable buyers directly on their site. Our customers place a great deal of trust in our product and we aim to be trusted partners to them, as invested in their success as they are.

We have a world-class customer success team that regularly connects with customers and provides a steady stream of high-fidelity feedback and insight. Engineers sync with them once a week to learn about what’s working and any customer pain points we can improve. Our on-call rotation also allows engineers to stay connected to our customers and live and breathe how the product operates. What’s more, we are the most passionate and committed users of our own technology – we use our platform to grow Qualified. Our engineering efforts are always closely tied to the value we’re creating for customers and are never done in a vacuum.

We’re on a mission to protect our users.

First and foremost, we use safe and tested techniques to make digital therapeutics to help millions of end users improve their mental health. However, we serve multiple partners. Our customers are large employers who offer our programs as mental health benefits. We also work with research partners, who come to us for rich and robust data. Lastly, our own colleagues come to us for creative and empowering tools. We have a duty to deliver our best work with lightning focus on what matters, situational awareness, and an unwavering empathy for all.

Each one of the millions we bring back to good mental health are guided down a path we create, a path that is often challenging. Sometimes it needs to get worse before it gets better. It is our job to protect our users along the way. We’re not just writing software, we’re creating digital therapeutics that have tremendous real-world impact.

Everyone – from our CEO to our interns – interacts with our customers daily.

We sweat the details when it comes to developer and user experience. We have open lines of communication with many of our customers, gathering feature feedback, bugs reports, and roadmap requests. For example, as we noticed our customer base growing internationally, we added foreign currency support and localized our SDK to seven languages in under a week.

Our customers include artists, musicians, YouTubers, and popular brands. As our feature set continues to grow, we have a unique challenge in understanding the customer’s needs and navigating them to the best solution in the nascent Web3 space. Our platform helps foster community with bespoke experiences like writers’ room tickets and access to artists’ latest music. We even power airdropping custom NFTs using emails – no code required.

Self-service and excellent developer support is a key priority for us, and we track how quickly we respond and resolve customer issues. It’s a big differentiating factor since our customers will hear from us directly (no automated responses!) within 1-2 business days.

Our customer is always the individual developer.

We will always prioritize features that individual developers will love over what large enterprises request, even if it leads to less revenue. We are so developer-focused that one might describe it as an obsession! At the end of the day, whether someone is building for a side project or as a part of a team at a 1,000-person company, the day-to-day problems are the same: devs want to be able to put secrets in and get secrets out, and have it be simple and enjoyable to use.

There are several ways we solicit feedback from our customers and triage it into our roadmap, including an intercom chat, a public community forum, and shared Slack channels. We also have a company-wide product ideation meeting, where anyone on the team can voice ideas they have and thoughts about what we should prioritize for each quarter.

An example of this is when we prioritized building out custom environments ahead of a long roadmap of enterprise features. We heard time and time again that developers wanted to be able to create custom environments outside of the standard “development”, “staging”, and “production” environments, such as CI/CD or QA. We knew how much flexibility it would bring our users so we built it! We strive to always put developers first!

Our business model is to grow as our customers grow.

As such, we go above and beyond to help our customers architect their banking backends and support their payment flows. The majority of our referrals currently come from the banks themselves. A client will go to them and say something like, “I need to send 100,000 payments per month, and I can’t do that through your dashboard.” Thus, the more banks we support, the more companies we can support too, so there’s a market pull from both sides. Additionally, within each bank there are different capabilities we’re working to support, which include everything from ACH to For Benefit Of accounts.

We love solving problems in original ways that delight our customers.

By implementing and managing the operation of key infrastructure security controls, we’re able to save engineers valuable time. Since we’re developers building a product for developers, we’re in a unique position to help solve customer pain points. Our goal is to make their lives easier, and one way we do that is by leading with design. This means we hold every feature accountable to the day-to-day experience of the person whose life that feature is intended to improve.

Since our customers are our North Star, it’s no surprise that we regularly interact with them and use their feedback to help us build the best product possible. For example, there are over 20 Slack channels that we share with customers. Not only will engineers drop in to answer customer questions directly (sometimes fixing bugs in real time for customers), but you’ll also see lots of activity every time we roll out a new feature. Even when we have to push back on a certain request, we’re always willing to hop on a call with customers to explain our reasoning.

We set an equally high bar for maintainability, evolvability, and performance.

Below is a view of Aptible.

We’re laser-focused on how we can best serve our customers.

We stay empathetically connected with our users through our proactive feedback loop, which helps us prioritize effectively.

There are several ways we incorporate our users’ voices into the products we build. Engineers work closely with our customer support team to address issues promptly through our weekly on-call rotation. Our design team regularly chats with users to listen to their perspectives and current needs. Anyone on the team can also join these calls to learn more about our customers’ product joys and pain points.

We use observability tools such as Datadog to keep track of important metrics and proactively solve issues before they become bigger problems. In addition, we survey households every month to understand how external factors like a changing economy, public health, and policy interventions impact families. You can check out our publicly shared research here!

We also aren’t afraid to pivot when issues arise. For example, at one point, users were reporting that their balances weren’t displaying accurately within the app. A member of our engineering team discovered an issue with scraping the data from state governments due to their lagging in updating it properly. The engineering team worked hand-in-hand with our public policy team to firefight and resolve the situation as quickly as possible. We understand the impact our product has on families’ day-to-day lives and always step up as active participants in the product.

While our product has important commercial relevance, Sphinx was founded to deliver a solution first and foremost for the U.S. government.

As part of that, we inherently need to build around the realities of where the U.S. government’s infrastructure is taking GPS, for example. That means we’re putting things in our product to account for some of the software that major defense contractors delivered decades ago. In other words, we sometimes choose technologies that are harder to work with, and wouldn’t be our first choice, because it’s what our customer requires. While this means that sometimes we don’t get to build exactly how we’d like to, working with the government allows us quick access to real world satellites and antennas that don’t exist in the commercial sector. Sphinx engineers get to see the real world impact of their work quickly.

Our mission is to transform risk into opportunity for our clients.

Thousands of clients, from tech unicorns to construction companies, depend on Newfront to run their businesses.

The product team at Newfront works directly with brokers and account managers to build the operating system for the brokerage, whether prospecting for clients, onboarding them to Newfront, or servicing their accounts. We also have an entire team dedicated just to broker happiness, and that team aggregates broker feedback and collaborates with engineering to drive product direction.

We feel lucky to sit in the same room as our end users solving real customer problems in a live operational environment. If you ship something in the morning, you might walk down the hall and see someone using your software later that afternoon (or discussing it in a beta channel on Slack).

We serve a two-sided marketplace and look to our customers’ needs to drive decision-making.

From day one, we’ve provided our product free to truckers. They lock in a fuel price in the app and we guarantee it for 24 hours, even if the price at the pump increases. Many truckers tell us this transparency around our discount pricing makes the difference between their businesses succeeding and failing. Mudflap is now a core part of truckers’ livelihoods, and we take that responsibility seriously. We often find the affinity truckers have for our product is emotional because it’s essential to their business.

Similarly, we’ve helped smaller fuel stations boost their visibility to attract more customers and increase their fuel sales. Previously, these truck stops would have to wait and hope that drivers would stop by on their own. With our app, drivers see these stops when they’re miles away. There are zero upfront costs or setup fees, no IT or POS Integration is required, and fuel stations can still set their own prices. We make money by charging low transaction fees, but in turn, these stations see a 40% average increase in driver traffic and increase the number of gallons sold in the first month by over 45K.

We maintain close relationships with customers on both sides of the marketplace by constantly monitoring and acting on their feedback and providing excellent customer service. The customer support team has not been offline since our company started in January 2020, as we know it’s critical to support our customers when they need us. Engineers are also heavily involved with our exclusive network of thousands of fuel stops. They often work directly with clients, from cashiers to the corporate office, to create a seamless user experience. At the end of the day, we’re building a long-term business to benefit all of our partners – truckers, fuel stops, investors, and employees alike.

Everyone at Orbit interacts closely with our customers and community members.

Simply put, there’s no way to work at Orbit without directly interfacing with our customers. We rely on our customers to tell us how they’re using Orbit in their daily lives. This direct feedback allows us to make the small incremental changes our customers’ need, as well as hone in on greater step-changes and our company roadmap.

We have open lines of communication with our customers, whether it’s a regular weekly call or via our Discord Server – we are constantly seeking ways to engage with our customers and advocates. We are always looking for ways to bring forward the voices of our fellow Community Managers and Developer Advocates. We want to drive mutual dialogue on how to use Orbit to successfully grow one’s business, drive deeper understanding of our community and how we can continue to make progress.

At times, it feels like customers are our co-workers. That’s why it’s so important that anyone thinking about joining the Orbit team feels excited about interfacing with customers regularly and aligning on what they need to be successful. This enables us to grow strategically and continue to build tight-knit communities. We have established product-market fit and have awesome early customers like Apollo, CircleCI, Typeform, Kubernetes, Gatsby, Datastax, and many more.