After five months of backpacking with my partner through Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, I wasn't confident I would be able to rejoin the crazy world of tech. I knew that being part of a dynamic startup with a product and team I believed in would help. Coffee would too.
What drew me into LaunchDarkly were all the demographic ‘wins' - a great product in a growing space, a strong, savvy team, and outstanding team of investors. Plus, as an audiophile, I love the To Be Continuous podcast, which features Paul Biggar of CircleCI and our very own Edith Harbaugh.
That was enough to start the conversation, but here's why I signed on to LaunchDarkly:
- For me, LaunchDarkly is at its Goldilocks moment. With a 16-person team, a technology that developers love, and a growing list of happy customers, the startup appeared poised to (pardon the pun) launch. But as the gears click into place, it creates a huge amount of operational fun in order figure out how to get it all done. Is it time to bring on more sales reps? Are we ready to move out of our excellent home at HeavyBit? Most importantly, does it all scale? To all of the above, an emphatic ‘yes.' The fun part is figuring out how it all comes together.
- You know nothing Jon Snow: In startups and in coding, I've found the best way to build is through experimentation. You come in with a thesis for how you believe the world works, but the hard truth is that you can't count on knowing anything about what your customers want. And when in doubt, you test. You set up experiments with a small set of customers to see what sticks and acknowledge when it doesn't. In startup land, this build-and-test culture has become the norm. But even as development cycles contract, code deployments are often a nail-biting all-or-nothing push. Enter feature flagging, which enables developers and product managers to stage deployments as a series of manageable chunks. In short, feature flagging lets us course correct even as we race ahead, and I love that LaunchDarkly enables that.
So how did it turn out? As of day 1, my expectations on the team, product and customers were right on. The snacks, however, were even better.
