R.J. Aquino

I'm looking for senior front-end engineers to build tools that enable healthcare providers to get paid fairly and quickly. https://lnkd.in/gXUzdCvJ At Anomaly we're solving one of the biggest problems in healthcare-- payments. We are on a mission to fix the broken payment system in healthcare. Despite billions of $ invested in EMRs, revenue cycle vendors, clearinghouses and insurance companies, the outcomes have only gotten worse for everyone (except...shockingly...insurance companies). Providers see 15%+ of all claims get denied and lose 3%-5% of net revenue due to fatal denials, millions of patients have care delayed and receive unnecessary bills, and we all end up paying for the $300+ billion in annual administrative waste that plays a big role in the double digit annual increases in insurance premiums. We are using healthcare expertise, modern ML techniques, and common sense to break through the crap and reinvent the way financial transactions work in healthcare. We are early in the process and have a lot of work ahead of us, but we have the best client partners, a big vision, backing from great investors, and an amazing team...if anyone can do it, we will. Please share and email me at [email protected] if you're interested

33

My friends at Flat.app launched on Product Hunt today 🥳 please upvote, comment and share 🙏 👇 a bit more about how I met the team (why they're awesome) and 3 lessons I learned from using Flat Early 2024 - I ended up talking to lots of people about what to do next. (thank you's to Scott Holand, Suchit Tuli, Abhinav Kapur John Lucas, Richard Hughes, John Sillings, and I'm sure many more I'm forgetting.) A conversation with Ron Feldman led to an introduction to Seth Purcell. Seth invited me to help out part-time with some product marketing at Flat, to use the tool, and provide some feedback. At a time when I was feeling pretty down on myself - I can't say how much it meant to me to get the opportunity. Here are three lessons learned from Flat's Product during that time (that maybe apply to life a bit too :)) # 1 - Keep It Simple: - Flat's Product made getting ramped up dead simple because all of the context for decision making was in one place - all project communication (*cough* Slack) and all work tracking. # 2 - Embrace Challenges & Blockers - Having visibility into your key "issues" or "blockers" is critical towards achieving your goals (which Flat does excellently). When you know what they are - embrace them and talk about them. # 3 - Think Long Term & Stay Curious - Flat's product allowed all teams full visibility into every team's work in progress. It gave us all a collective sense of the big picture we were working towards, and the progress we were making. If you hate too many tools, notifications, inboxes - or if you just really like staying organized :) I highly recommend Flat for your next project. Congrats on the hard work and thanks again for letting me be a part of it! 👉 upvote, comment, share here: https://lnkd.in/eeskDbMr

25

2 Comments

As we kick off Q4 in just a couple days, I wanted to reflect on all the new things we've rolled out to our users on Huddled just in the past month alone. We dropped Huddled v1.10 earlier this month – it was probably one of the most exciting updates we've shipped. ✨ We've doubled down on our AI tools and doing so in an ethical way. We're making it even safer and faster when connecting and collaborating online to improve the way teams, groups and cohorts work together. 🤩 Message reactions; a small touch with big emotions. Just to make it 10x easier to acknowledge a message without having to reply to it. 💡 Portfolios to showcase your work and who you are. Huddled is a great way for education providers, accelerators and organisations to enable their members to express themselves and showcase who they are. We've rolled out new tools to add images to each work experience or education as well as profile prompts to perhaps help kickstart the conversation with some icebreakers! 🖌 A much more robust post creator. We know our users love using posts on Huddled to share important news, announcements, resources...etc to those in their workspace. We always look to improve our UX / UI across the platform – so we think this change is definitely a small but important one! The full rundown is linked below, if you'd like to check it out! What to expect in upcoming updates 👉 more of 'Huddled AI', more portfolio-focused tools, revamped admin panel for analytics and workspace management, advanced tools to organise messages/posts...just to name a few!

28

5 Comments

Today was my last day at Notion. There are a few key learnings I'll be incorporating into the new company I'm starting: 1. You can get a lot done with a small team The Calendar team shipped Notion Calendar with a team of *3 engineers*. People are always shocked when they hear this — most teams shipping entire products are much larger than that. But with a team of ambitious, tight-knit individuals, it's incredible how much you can accomplish. Take your time to hire the right people. It'll be worth it. 2. Minimize code review times to maximize velocity During normal working hours, we maintained an average of ~15 minutes for a code review. We all prioritized keeping each other unblocked, and were able to ship a ton of code because we never had to wait around for a review. Keep PRs small and build a culture that prioritizes reviewing code. 3. Hire generalists Every engineer on the Calendar team was comfortable across the stack (frontend, backend, infra). This allowed us to always focus on the highest priorities for the team — we never had to push out a feature because our "frontend person" was busy with something else. This one is company-dependent, but worked incredibly well for us. Hire people that are flexible and excited to learn new things. I'm incredibly excited for the future of Notion — I don't know that I've ever worked with a group as talented, ambitious, and kind. As for what's next, I'm excited to step back into the Founder role and will be sharing more soon!

684

51 Comments

If you really need multiple backend repos before you have multiple teams question whether you should be multiple companies. If not you’re probably better off as a monorepo if so you’ve got bigger concerns. At UpContent we’re actively retreating from the architectural complexity of micro-repos, as a smaller team it’s just unnecessary and most tech these days support multiple separately deployable components/services in a mono repo. Exceptions might be tiny services that don’t hit your main db and for whatever reason are in another language. People always forget that part of microservice architecture principles were separate databases and no shared code. People also forget they were a way for large companies to segregate duties with fully autonomous teams each owning a service not a strategy for startups with one team. Multi-repo is a very valuable tool in the tool box but it is one for after your first team split and when you process in place to handle cross team coordination.

1

Senior engineers lose money and responsibility at Meta partly because of an unwritten rule. Candidates are expected to not follow their interviewer's instructions to SUCCEED. Yes, you read that right. That blew my mind. There are other common reasons for downleveling as well. Some of these are expected but others are surprising. Kevin Landucci + Kashish Singhal, loved the simple practical takeaway for candidates. And the full episode rocked! Subscribe to ApplyPass to get more tips in your feed 🛎

20

3 Comments

ENOUGH WITH THE FRAMEWORKS! If you've worked with me, you've probably heard me say that. Product teams should be focused on driving outcome and impact, not falling in love with the process. And that's something Peter Yang from Roblox knows all too well. We had a great conversation on Next Gen Builders about how the PM role is evolving, how to use #AI to focus on more important work (like talking to customers), and more. Tune in to our conversation: https://lnkd.in/dY-AZh2s

81

5 Comments

What if notebooks could be as pretty and collaborative as Notion? 🤔 That's exactly what we're doing at Briefer (YC S23). This week alone, two of our users told me they love our approach to UX because Briefer is the only tool that people outside the data team can easily navigate through (and the only one they're not afraid of) Besides that, all edits happen in real time, even when two people edit the same notebook (just like Notion too), as you can see below By the way, if you're an engineer, you might enjoy the blog post below in which I explain how we're using CRDTs to make notebooks collaborative in real-time 👇

23

1 Comment

🌟 Excited to share this insightful blog post by my talented friend Laura Liu Cruickshanks on the essentials of Product-Led Growth! A must-read for anyone passionate about product innovation and growth! Check it out here: [A Beginner's Guide to Navigating Product-Led Growth](https://lnkd.in/dpBDCS9s) #ProductLedGrowth #Innovation #GrowthStrategy #Pendo #MustRead

9

1 Comment

Come join us on Nov 13 at 10am PT / 1pm ET for a live webinar, How Notion Engineering uses Notion. We'll dive into how our engineering team uses our own tool to create workflows that enable us to work faster, better, and more collaboratively. We’ll show you how we: 🏗️ Quickly access important information via our engineering teamspace 🚦 Track project status and assign tasks—directly in Notion 🏃 Automate workflows to save time and help us build more swiftly Don't miss out! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gB9NcYmB

60

1 Comment

The biggest mindset shift most senior PMs / Designers / Eng Mgrs / TLs who are building customer-facing products in midsized & large companies must make: Your main job is to make your product win. While it may seem like this Job # 1 should be obvious to all, it really isn’t. Here are some other leading contenders for Job # 1: - Main job is to make my manager happy - Main job is to make execs happy - Main job is to keep stakeholders happy - Main job is to keep team members happy - Main job is to build excellent systems - Main job is to get promoted - Main job is to launch as promised - Main job is to create user delight - Main job is to create customer value (some people LOVE saying this one) Now, I understand that we live in the real world and that there are “good reasons” why the above contenders are at least worthy of consideration. But I am saying what I am saying precisely because we live in the real world and because I think you should do your best to improve your odds of *long-term career success*. You see, as a passionate & ambitious product person who builds the mindset of making your product win as your Job # 1, you will do things & learn things that most of your other peers are not doing & learning. And by doing that over the long arc of your career, you will position yourself to reach closer to whatever is your optimal success potential. This is clearly not the only possible path and it may not be the right path for some / many (no single path can be). But it is at least worth considering if it seems to feel right to you. Most people spend years / decades in mid-sized & large companies and yet are never even told that this is an option they should consider for their long-term career success. If that is you, I want you to view this post just as a possibly helpful pointer. If it doesn’t resonate, that’s totally fine. But if it does resonate, you might over the long-term see yourself becoming a more competent, a more effective, and possibly even a more happy product person.

929

55 Comments

"Nobody likes laying bricks all day, but people will do it if they're building a great cathedral." Lane Shackleton (CPO Coda) learned this lesson about why product vision matters early in his career. He has since interviewed 100s of product teams from Figma, Uber, Spotify, and more. In my new episode, Lane shares his favorite rituals on: - Crafting a vision - Running product reviews - Getting stakeholder buy-in - Making decisions faster - Learn by making not debating Some quotes from Lane: "Product reviews often take too long to schedule and get derailed by the highest-paid person in the room. The Catalyst ritual fixes these issues." "Two-way write-ups are better than slides and docs because they let you gather structured feedback and focus on the most important questions to discuss live." "We work hard to create a great culture for makers. We believe that shipping is often the fastest way to learn." 📌 Watch now: https://lnkd.in/gbQvTtxz Also available on: Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gZHvjweU Apple: https://lnkd.in/gY2BRiay Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gctjf8Cm

133

14 Comments

Pinterest decreased clone times by 99% with a one-line change, here's how: In 2020, Pinterest's largest monorepo had more than 350k commits and was 20GB in size. Their continuous build pipelines (Jenkins) took 40 minutes each time to clone that massive repo. What was odd was that they were telling Git to do a shallow clone which shouldn't take that long. Digging into the script that invoked Git, they realized they left off the "refspec" option. If you leave that off, the default is to tell Git to fetch all refspecs (e.g. "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*") In their case, this fetched more than 2500 branches each time, which explains why it took so long. To fix this, they added one line to their build config which specified that they only cared about master (e.g. "+refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master") Setting this decreased cloning times from 40 minutes to 30 seconds. In big tech, it's easy to think building ambitious new systems is the best way to have a massive impact. In reality, doing what we do today, but more efficiently, can make the biggest difference. If you liked this engineering blog post breakdown, let me know in the comments and I'll do more of them so you can learn from these top company stories. Here's the full article if you're interested: https://lnkd.in/dDZrNkYe

1,234

27 Comments

To all Aspiring PMs: YOU ARE NOT ALONE! 🫵 Lately, I've been getting reached out to by many aspiring Product Managers, all grappling with a shared challenge - getting noticed in the competitive job market. It's a tough time, especially given the current state of the tech industry. But don't lose hope! Even in today's landscape, there are strategies to make your candidacy shine, even for those few entry-level PM positions available. So, how to get your candidacy noticed ? Read my article bellow ⬇️ #BreakIntoProduct #JobSearch #FAANG

30

4 Comments

I'm often asked about the difference between full-time and fractional product work. Here's one of the things I always tell folks -- fractional is all about impact, impact, impact 🔥 This means that the ability to develop context quickly, ramp up (and get educated) around new problem spaces & industries and sniff out potential challenges for a product and team are crucial...and also what makes the role so damn fun and dynamic. Side-note: This is not to say this isn’t the case with full-time work. The best full-time folks certainly adopt this mindset. But I know this to be *particularly* the case with fractional work and what you should expect when working with a stellar fractional professional.

48

6 Comments

The hard truth? The more you try to please everyone, the faster you’ll run out of runway. Here’s what I’ve seen kill promising startups: The “Everyone” Trap: 🚫 Confusing, bloated products 🚫 Weak, unfocused marketing messages 🚫 Resources spread too thin 🚫 Teams losing sight of their real purpose What Actually Works: ✅ Targeting a specific audience ✅ Solving one painful problem really well ✅ Speaking in your audience’s language ✅ Building exactly what your users need, nothing more Why Focus Matters: ↳ Real connections with customers ↳ Quick, meaningful product improvements ↳ Efficient use of resources ↳ A powerful, clear message Think about it: → Amazon started with books. → Uber began with black cars in San Francisco. ↳ They mastered one thing before expanding. Remember: Building something a few people love is better than building something everyone kind of likes. What’s one product that made you feel, “This was built just for me”?

45

8 Comments

I saw a slide on Twitter last week teasing Peter Yang’s talk @ Figma Config (great talk btw) where he reminded everyone about the killer Frank Slootman mantra: - Narrow the focus - Up the quality - Increase the speed It was super timely because we’ve actually spent the last and current sprints on exactly those things. Over the last few months, we’ve shipped a ton of new features on Inari (YC S23) to experiment and see what sticks but had to make tradeoffs on quality and speed, which we’re now paying our debts to fix. We’ve found 3 processes working really well for upping quality: 1️⃣ Friction logging then resolving immediately Everyday, throughout the day, Eric and I log every minor bug or feature that “feels” unpolished to ourselves or gets mentioned by customers into 1 consolidated Slack channel. We’ve been blocking off 1-2 hours every night to pickoff and fix or polish every issue before we go to sleep. Cumulatively we’ve picked off 20-30+ fixes just in the last 2 weeks and the experience improvements feel like they're compounding. 2️⃣ Implement policy of polishing the details We’ve been setting better standards on what “acceptable” is before features ship. For example, we basically set a “no spinners allowed” policy. I know every designer is facepalming but previously our buttons and state changes were visibly showing a ton of loading delays and spinners. We’ve refactored as much as possible to updating buttons/states optimistically so users see changes “instantly” and we handle delays and complexity under the hood. 3️⃣ Using our product daily I’ve been that annoying PM but have been pushing myself and Eric to use Inari in more and more of our product development workflow. Every time a customer conversation comes in and we’re deciding what to build next or we’re manually onboarding a bigger team, we work through our product end to end, logging our own issues and wants, then ship those fixes. Some things we shipped under the hood based on these process changes: - This is soon to launch but we’re seeing 20-30%+ pt accuracy improvements on customer quote attribution, more relevant insights and issues, and 30-40% reduction in time spent analyzing with our refactored analysis pipeline. - Loading the app is 3x+ faster and more stable than before. - Inari feels 10x more polished with optimistic state changes and less spinners. - We’ve deprecated multiple features that weren’t being used frequently or hitting our quality bar. If you have anymore tips or process changes for shipping higher quality experiences, comment them since I’d love to hear about them! We’d love to try them out.

22

3 Comments

Slack or Teams? Both are power houses in terms of DAU and supported features. But most people I speak to prefer the look and feel and experience of Slack. It just feels more fun to use Slack, and honestly, who doesn’t want to inject even a smidgen more fun into the daily grind? Turns out, it was intentional. The team that designed Slack wanted to make it feel like a video game. When you put it side by side with other corporate tools, that sentiment comes through clearly. This goes beyond software. Have you been to Bun Burger Kitchen in Lakewood with the sauce pipes zig zagging across the ceiling? Who doesn’t want to go get some extra sauce? There has been plenty of research around making hospitals and doctors office more fun and how that positively impacts the experience. Bottom line… it’s all intentional and up to you. If you’re building any kind of experience, how do you want people to feel? How do you want to bring people back?

14

13 Comments

I am at the stage of my engineering career where I die a little bit when an engineer wants to add a new library or plugin to our product, and I get irrationally excited when they find one to delete. Building on the Web these days often feels like a game where you see how much weight you can put in a boat before it sinks, but you get $1 for every pound you add instead of how many days it stays afloat. Engineering needs leaders who can renegotiate that game. There are strong business cases for performance budgets, moving carefully, deleting features, and curating your dependency chain. But that requires really great communication skills and business alignment, because it means intentionally forgoing maximum speed short-term for lower maintenance overhead long-term. This is a core tension of all engineering. Anyway, I was just excited my team deleted a plugin and accidentally explained why promoting your "fastest" engineer to management will always put you in a deeper hole. Happy Monday!

24

1 Comment