Engineers build better when they're in the room

If you ask an engineer about how much time it'll cost to go and build something, and it's something that they came up with or they're advocating for, it's almost always half the time as something that you are asking for, as a PM. And that motivation is so different.

If you ask an engineer about how much time it'll cost to build something they came up with versus something you're asking for as a PM, it's almost always half the time. That motivation is so different.

When you take the people that are part of the project team out of the creative loop entirely, they're going to find that creative outlet somewhere else and it's actually kind of bad for the product.

When our engineers are able to understand our journalists' needs at the same level as we are, they're able to define the how to do it with so much greater clarity and precision.

It's so important to think of your engineers as partners and not just resources. And when they are embedded into the process right upfront, it makes the whole process in general more efficient.

Early on, we started bringing in engineers to customer meetings more and more... it's so simple and it's so effective. When we started doing it, the response from the engineering team was great and then also it helped us dig into a different side of the customer while we were on call sometimes.

The degree of motivation is so different if that engineer has somehow experienced a problem. When you can create that sense of personal accountability, then all this crazy progress happens.