Kevin is the VP of Engineering at Abnormal Security, overseeing all aspects of growth and execution. In this class, he walks through the steps required to create and support a SaaS product from an engineering perspective, with a particular focus on what aspects to prioritize in the early days of your product. Kevin spent time at eBay and Quantcast prior to becoming an early-stage engineer leader at TellApart, then a Director of Engineering at Twitter.
Kevin W: Yeah, this is another kind of tough one. I [00:14:00] think one that I've seen very, I guess different. strategies and I think methodologies both from enterprise companies and consumer companies, I used to be an engineer later Twitter as an example.
I think the first thing that you have to do, when I think about feedback loops or product development, First, can you even build a product to the spec that was being asked for right from product from design. And what I've always found is the faster you can do very quick iteration loops with more, dogfooding getting these,very quick, PRS, even in front on a staging instance to a designer or product manager early and often is much better than waiting for that last mile dog pudding session where you've been realized.
Kevin W: This was not what we actually intended to build, and now you have to do weeks worth of rework. So the first thing I would really emphasize for people is to really think through how to get that steady drip of dogfooding and just Sandy checking along the way, not just from engineering, but from the entire product development.
Project management and design along the way. Very similarly. I think the other thing [00:15:00] that's been really helpful for us, as well as making sure that same vein now with the customer base, we're doing that continuous iterative feedback cycle. So we're not caught by surprise that we just spent weeks or months building that feature before we ever show it to an actual customer, To get any feedback from them. So we frequently have, these concepts of working with design partners, right from our customer base, who we're having weekly sessions with and we're showing. Storyboards or prototypes or things that haven't even shipped to production yet to get their feedback and say, we think this is on track for the thing you said you were worried about and concerned about.
let us know if we got something wrong along that way. So it's really helpful. And I think surprising for us at times that the kind of feedback we've heard that have been changed, the new product direction for development, right on that particular feature or product. So I think generally to say, you really have to make sure you're getting steady, constant iterations of feedback from your broader customers and stakeholders.
Kevin W: That's what I've always found the most helpful to do this.
