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.
I think it's something that evolves and adapts over time. I would say,at the highest level you have to be making sure you're looking through the larger portfolio of the types of features and tasks that your engineering team should be building from.
Kevin W: For example, it's probably pretty clear and obvious that if you're doing exclusively a hundred percent customer facing product roadmap, tasks, and never picking up any engineering, excellence, tech debt reduction, refactoring scaling operations. You're probably failing as an engineering team is [00:12:00] engineering a leader.
And conversely, if the only task you're actually taking as well. Engineering excellence, tech debt reduction, refactoring, but never doing any customer facing product roadmap features. You're also failing as an engineering team. So it really, I think comes down from making sure that you're prioritizing the portfolio.
Kevin W: And what is this percentage weightings that you need to be thinking about across your entire engineering team at any given time, and making sure your. Proper representation and sampling across those different buckets. So those are at least two that I think about the product roadmap, internal engineering excellence.
And again, these things might change based off of if your product is less stable today than you actually want it to be, or you're not hitting your SLA for uptime. you probably need to prioritize more engineering excellence now. Over product group, my features, and you have to rethink that kind of sampling.
I think the third thing that I've always thought about here that granted is a struggle, I think, for any startup, who's always trying to balance the short term and the longterm is at some point you have to be looking out and. There's only a small number of things that are truly going to make a difference [00:13:00] for what this company needs to look like a year out from now to survive.
Kevin W: And those things can frequently be very non-obvious based off of, again, the immediate tech that you're paying down and bugs that are being filed or product roadmap features coming. And we call those things internally. These big boulders, there's some initiatives that we have to proactively go after because we know.
What the company, what the architecture, what our customer base will look like a year from now. And then we work backwards from saying, if we believe those things need to be true. Here are these big bullets we have to find and start working on now, With kind of that discipline and dedication against them.
So I do think you have to have that portfolio theory of playing against a lot of these different swim lanes and work streams. And the weightings of the things will change over time, obviously, which how many big boulders you do. On day one, we were desperate for product market fit and validation, very different than when you're multiple years in the company with more conviction that your company will endure, For a number of years going forward. And you'll have to change those weights appropriately as well.
