How a 2x IPO Executive Builds Products Fast (Without Breaking Them). Scott Williamson.

You have had an incredible career in product management. You joined SendGrid in 2013 as their very first product leader and you scaled that team to over 30 product managers through the company's 2019 IPO and then the acquisition by Twilio. You also were GitLab's chief product officer from 2019 to 2022, and you grew that organization from 15 to over 65 members and help that company go through an IPO. How do you build products faster without losing quality?

This is a lesson I learned really well at GitLab and in one word, it's iteration. We were an all remote company and we wanted to keep things simple for any one person who was working on a particular project. So the general idea is have a bigger goal or agenda, but then break it down into very small iterations. And when you do that, you can move really fast because the change that you're working on at any one time tends to be smaller, simpler, require less coordination, there's less technical risk. You can make that small change, ship it, learn, keep going. It's human nature to try to make things big and keep adding and scope grows and next thing you know, technical risk, complexity, coordination challenges emerge. And thanks S.L. slow down. So iteration is hard, sometimes counterintuitive, but if you get it right, you can both move fast and keep quality high.