Parag Shah

This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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While some folks hire entire Figma design teams for their personal websites, I'm here at 6:30 AM explaining to my partner why I need a third coffee to "write stuff." 2022: "I'll share monthly insights about building companies!" 2024: checking it -> Writing consistency matches crypto winter performance 📉 But look - AI got better at English faster than I got better at writing. That's what we call product-market fit. New strategy for 2025 - Actually write 12 articles - Convince partner these dawn coffee raids are essential business ops Track my progress (or lack thereof) here: https://lnkd.in/e6bkkxvH P.S. If my partner reads this - yes, this is exactly what I'm doing at 6:00 AM either wiring or reading the book. Note: Will open source my coffee consumption metrics in Q3 2025. Full transparency, like web3 promised.

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1 Comment

"Early-stage startup" and "maternity leave" sometimes feels at odds. Many parents opt for the big companies during their parental leave years, but I've taken three maternity leaves at early stage startups. As I transition back into full-time work after this last parental leave, I took some time to reflect on how the three leaves I've taken have been similar or different. I hope it is useful to others! (link in comments)

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Last Tuesday, Malsgufa, our legacy CMS backend, was shut down. This milestone for BI's Tech and Product team culminated years of planning, effort, and execution. Malsgufa's first commit was on July 25, 2014, leading to 5,186 commits across nearly 30 repositories. Built and maintained by scores of engineers, its deprecation represents significant cost savings (20 production replicas, 3 instances of Solr, and an insane number of Zookeeper instances!), reduced security risk, and the elimination of an often-blamed boogeyman. The journey began in January 2020. Our challenge: moving traffic off Malsgufa without rebuilding everything in Muse. Initially, we tried GraphQL as an intermediary between Viking and our services, but progress was limited by Viking's complex Angular/Vue architecture. In January 2023, we pivoted to the strangler fig pattern with a shim. This approach proved far more effective – all Malsgufa traffic went through the shim first, with verbose logging to track unhandled requests. Meanwhile, we built Story Versioning API (SVAPI), incorporating lessons learned from Malsgufa's limitations around history and publishing states. We ran four major migrations (stories, custom pages, slideshows, and videos), building support in Muse and shimmed compatibility for Viking. Traffic gradually decreased from a torrent to a trickle, leading to the gloriously uneventful shutdown. Next, we will deprecate Viking by Q2 2025, unifying our users in the Muse ecosystem to create the industry's most innovative CMS. Special thanks to the entire Story Creation team: Chase Gruber, Chris Speziale, Daniel Arita, Danny Feliz, Dasha Lary, Dawin Camillo, Eric Saam, Frederica Chen, John Laslo, Kelly Filush, Morgan Cohn, Sarah Pai, Tyler Greenfield! Thanks also to DaD, Engagement, Helpfulness, Cloud Engineering, Test Engineering, and Operational Excellence! Finally, we recognize Malsgufa itself. Developed as a unified CMS backend to support Business Insider's expansion into new markets, it served our global newsroom reliably for a decade, publishing millions of stories despite no major changes in recent years. While it became less sustainable as our business evolved, it deserves our respect. Thank you, Malsgufa. May you rust in peace.

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UPDATE: It's here! For anyone who missed my talk at this year's Product Collective (Acquired by Pendo) INDUSTRY, you can watch it right now (link in comments below). I'm already working on iterating with some great feedback from the conference, but you tell me - what else would you like to see? What's missing? What could be better? Hit me with that feedback 😎 #product #productmanagement #productstrategy #productleadership

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In my experience of interviewing and working with many product leaders, a common trait among the great ones is treating their craft more as a science than an art. Delighting users, creating magical experiences, and ultimately developing software that users love to use is a science. An immediate red flag during interviews is when product leaders can't express details beyond "talking to customers" on how they build lovable products. While talking to customers is paramount, I listen for the structure and tools they use to become customer-centric and experts in the users they serve. Here’s what I look for: Methods to Listen For When Evaluating How Product Leaders Create Lovable Products: 🗺️ Journey Mapping: Understand what users do before and after they interact with your product or attempt to accomplish their job. 🔑 Key Moments Identification: Reveal the key moments that matter in the user journey. 😌 Emotional State Awareness: Understand the emotional states of users and how they change as they progress through the journey. 📊 Data Collection and Analysis: Collect and analyze data to understand funnels, drop-off rates, attrition, etc. I’m also on the lookout for specific techniques on how the product leader builds high-performing product teams. Here are some of the practices to listen for: 🏆 Recognition and Rewards: Establish clear KPIs that define success, create accountability, and drive alignment. Implement a system for recognizing and rewarding team achievements and individual contributions. 🤝 Consistent 1-on-1s: Conduct regular one-on-one meetings to mentor and guide the career and development of the product management team. 👥 Team Collaboration: Allow teams to craft their process and evolve it over time. My favorite team performance ceremony is the retrospective, where the team can gather in a safe place and collectively define how they will improve. 🔄 Cross-Functional Alignment: Create alignment between product, engineering, sales, marketing, and leadership. This involves regular cross-functional meetings, transparent communication of goals and progress, and a unified vision that ties the efforts of all departments together. Ensuring that all teams are moving in the same direction is crucial for driving consistent and sustainable growth. Overall, there are many important items across both themes that define effective product leadership. By listening for a product leader who employs these structured methods, companies can make a better hire to turn insights into actionable strategies, ensuring that the user experience is not left to chance but meticulously crafted and continuously improved, while building and managing high-performing teams that drive success.

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4 Comments

Simplicity is the true proof of seniority.

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It's probably no surprise to anyone that knows me well, that I love self-development podcasts. One of my favorite is Ramit Sethi's I will teach you to be rich (aka Money for Couples). I recently got this email newsletter When I ask people what their Rich Life looks like, most people say something like: "I want to do what I want, when I want."   Success is rarely a dollar amount. Most people want a lifestyle. In the workplace, this means having a flexible job.    Which might look like: -Never having to do the daily commute to the office -Having a schedule that lines up with when you’re most productive -Taking a spin class in the middle of the day -Picking up your kids from school every afternoon -Living in different countries for several months at a time If this describes your idea of a great job, Pinterest is for you. Check out the 75 open roles in engineering: https://lnkd.in/gapDB_u3 At Pinterest, we hire smart people and trust them to do a good job. We don't track how often you badge into a building or how many days you show up in the office. We care about the business impact your code generates. We know that in person collaboration is useful, and we come in the office about 1/week. This isn't an unbreakable rule that you will get punished for violating. We want you to be your best you and to do your best work. We believe that flexibility enhances creativity and productivity. If you see something that calls to you, reach out and I am happy to answer questions.

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After 10+ years working with early-stage startups it’s fair to say I’ve seen I’ve seen some things (& some things I will never unsee), learned some things, earned some stripes, some scars, and some measure of expertise (one hopes) helping more than a dozen startups find product-market fit. While I’ve enjoyed year-long runways at well-funded startups that were eventually acquired, or went public, or very publicly imploded—what really taught me the real meaning of Lean startup was working with self-funded founders who had ten compelling concepts but resources to build one. When you don’t have a year to be wrong; you learn to get it right very fast. If you are a founder facing your own set of high stakes decisions & tradeoffs; we can help. For free. You can book a 1 hour chat with us to talk through all the things racing through your head. We know what’s involved in getting something tested, validated, and built; this is what we do every day all day. We might not have all the answers but there is a good chance we can give you some clarity, some calm, some options. Call us at 1.844.4FLAGRANT or DM me. And if you want to get a sense of what we are like as hoomans- check out our Delightful Reveal series. It’s all the things we have been reading, watching, listening to, & enjoying. https://lnkd.in/gfrz9tQS #startups #entrepreneurship #socialentrepreneurs #innovation

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One thing humans seem to be really good at intuiting is whether a thing was created with care. It’s a quality that’s hard to fake. The consequence is that, as a maker, I’m often paranoid that we get caught out as having made a product that doesn’t exude a high degree of care. Naturally, Sohil and I have been obsessing over getting Tusk (YC W24)'s developer experience just right. This means embedding our AI coding agent as seamlessly as humanly possible into an engineering team’s workflow from start to finish. We’ve released several new features to improve Tusk's PR merged rate + DX and are looking for feedback from a larger group of developers: 🩺 AI triaging: Tusk automatically looks at tickets in your ticketing software and flags those that it can create a PR for. If Tusk needs more context, the agent will prompt you with questions. 🐛 Bug reporting integrations: We extract screen recordings from Jam and Bird Eats Bug to debug issues before generating code. 📹 Video support: Tusk ingests Loom videos (including the audio) in your ticket to come up with more accurate code solutions. 🔄 Auto-address feedback: Tusk automatically addresses errors from automated checks like your build and lint steps so that any PR it creates will pass your checks. If you’re an engineer or PM interested in LLM agents, DM me and – if it's a fit – I’ll give you a free trial of Tusk and buy you a meal (wherever you are in the world) to hear your thoughts.

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Check out our second AI feature we've added to the platform below!

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After an absolutely amazing 3 years (to the day quite literally), I am leaving Retool for my next adventure. It’s been a wild (and fun) ride of growing and scaling engineering from a group of 13 to an org of 100+, building 4 net-new product lines, and expanding the business. The thing I’ve always held strongly is that the team here *just ships*, and reflecting on my time, it’s heartwarming to think about how much landed: not just our new products in Workflows, External, Mobile, and RetoolDB, but everything ranging from runtime rewrites, to new component libraries, multiplayer, debug tools, our AI suite, new source control systems, a new IDE — the list just goes on and on. Retool is an incredibly special product, company, and organization to me — not just because of my time and experience there, but because of what we are trying to do: bring more good software into the world, especially when most internal tools don’t get the TLC they would otherwise need to be good. It spoke to me from first principles as a builder (both software and orgs) when I first joined, and continues to do so today all the same. It’s an incredible group, and one that I’ll miss so dearly. David Hsu and Anthony, thanks for bringing me in several years back and leading this charge. And for those reading who aren’t familiar with Retool, you should absolutely check it out; it’ll accelerate your eng team, but more importantly, your business overall. As for me, in terms of what’s next: I’m excited to build again. More to come there, but after a 10 year hiatus, I'm back to the startup-founding days!

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"Which is why strong product companies understand that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well, than to train a manager to be an expert." I've had front row seats to these misses in management - where someone wants to be a manager/director/leader, or worse has become one, without having done the work at all or not been excellent at the work first. An important requirement of leading empowered product teams is being a great coach. And great coaches have developed good product sense because they have put in the hours of doing product work themselves. "Imagine trying to coach someone on effective product discovery if you’re not experienced with this work yourself. Or on creating an effective product strategy. Or a product vision. Or a team topology."

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🤔 Looking at YC's latest Request for Startups struck me: Every category—gov tech, manufacturing, fintech, space—has AI humming under the hood. 🔄 Maybe it's not about having AI (like it's not about "having electricity" ⚡). It's about reimagining whole industries with it. 🚀 Checkout the whole article: https://lnkd.in/gcQkKMja

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You know there's some momentum happening if Marty Cagan decides to write about a product topic you've been at work trying to enable for years. Love to see it, and BIG shout out to Stacey Langer for providing her expertise in this article! 🧘‍♀️ Here are a few other pros that came to mind for the product model: 1. The government product model makes product (public) value and risk management possible. Product risks—such as value, desirability, viability, and feasibility—are not risks that traditional project management models can effectively manage. Government agencies interact with the public through the services they offer, but government digital experiences are not always inherently valuable. It’s what these digital services do for users that create individual and public value. Building tech alone ≠ value. 2. Evidence-driven decision-making uses discovery, iterative delivery, and testing with actual end users, where you continuously learn. This enables many things, mainly building with your users while validating the solution direction. It can also enable an incremental funding option specifically for products/services (traditionally called ‘projects’) that are especially complex, high priority, and/or contain many unknowns. 3. Driving technology from a place of vision and strategy measured in outcomes that can align and even influence policy changes. 🤸‍♀️ Some realities in trying to adopt a product model in gov: 1. The word ‘product’ often can be confusing, especially when it doesn’t fully represent what is being built and managed. A lot, if not most, of the technology work happening in government often involves solving service design challenges. So, in gov products, you focus on solving for the end-to-end experience, which can mean processes and non-tech things. 2. Conway’s Law and government systems replicate the organizational structures in agencies, which are often siloed and isolated. This is often represented as 'legacy tech.' Much of the work in 'product' in government is modernizing legacy systems, which requires the same principles as the product model but often a different emphasis on its varied approaches. Not all products or digital services start from the same place; many are not greenfield. 3. Traditional ATO structures can stop the product operating model in its tracks. To overcome this, it is important to integrate the ATO into the product model, utilizing a ‘continuous ATO’ operating model. But see point 2 above. At the end of the day, the product model isn’t a process you learn to implement and then just implement. It’s not just ‘Agile’ or Scrum or DevOps. Those methods can (or sometimes can’t) enable the product model. It's a mentality and discipline for continuously using new inputs to deliver value throughout a product's LIFE. It's a cultural change as much as an operating change, and there is no 'single way' to do it. However, operating from product thinking principles can help us start from the right place.

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I've been interviewing a lot of people, so I get some variant of this question a lot. What does Remi actually do? I explain our unique business model & opportunity in my latest post. https://lnkd.in/gswR5anB

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If you've ever had to deal with inconsistent UX, multiple generations of design systems, and the perpetual back and forth between UI and backend developers - there's hope, you are not alone. And let me just say it out loud - there's no "full stack" development - it is simply impossible for an engineer to stay up to date on all the development across JavaScript, frameworks, Node.js, Kubernetes, Java, etc. You either have deep and somewhat narrow, or broad and shallow. These problems are quite common for everyone who has inherited an existing product (which is like 99.9% of us). This blog post by Kyle Shevlin about building a tightly-enforced composable design system resonated with me. #UI #designsystem #react https://lnkd.in/gStEWHtC

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