Writing code, as a startup exec
If you've been part of a founding team then this is going to be an all too familiar story. As employees 1A and B at Loyal, Jamie and myself were software builders. He took on a lot of our API and back-end infrastructure, I handled our front-end, design and product management duties.
We optimized for go-to-market and we wrote a lot of code, had many many Sketch files and were constantly talking to each other. Loyal has been lucky enough to grow and 4 years later we both have grown into new roles and find ourselves rarely committing code or creating design specs for our product.
We've grown into "startup managers". There are varying phases to this and I haven't experienced all the different phases since we're still growing, but I thought I'd write this because there is one thing I dearly miss.
Coding.
Don't get me wrong, I love my current role. It's very challenging and the types of problems we solve now require foresight and strategy. Plus to have the people (read: Chad Mallory) put faith in my ability to execute on product is second to none. But there is a lot of joy in pushing your app for everyone to see and use -- anyone who's written software for a living can certainly vibe with me here.
So in 2020 - while we continue to scale - I've committed to writing code to our codebase. I see two major benefits here:
- I take a little time out of my day to keep up my skill and to challenge myself at an engineering level
- I still feel the work & pain it takes to write software
The 2nd one is especially noteworthy. That as we manage people and trust them to build the things that can make or break the business, to also remember the challenges they face as individual contributors.
How has it been so far? Well, I pushed a little front-end feature out last week and my goodness has our codebase changed (for the better!) in just over a year (pretty much the time I started being hands off). React Hooks? Styled components? Bit.src? Kubernetes? I've never been so excited about our engineering team. And thanks Matt Cohen and Kyle Sweeney for being nice to me during the code review :D.
Abhi, great update 😀!
The final objective writing of a code - this is the most crucial thing.
Someone recently told me "You feel your technical experience slipping further away with every refactor your team does".
Hits very close to home, growing to new roles and challenges at the cost of leaving the code behind. Thanks for sharing Abhi, and congratulations on the success thus far. Inspired to push new front end code this year as well!
Sounds very familiar!! I think still being able to take it end to end from code (obviously way less code) to strategy gives us an advantage! Better not break that build though :)