Welcome to On Deck Product Engineering!

This playbook is designed for all new members to the Product Engineering org. It is a living document that will evolve over time.

We're excited to have you on board

Product Engineering Team Overview

Company Overview

The On Deck product is an invaluable part of the experience, but also has break-out potential as a potential LinkedIn competitor. - On Deck Series A Memo

Who we are

(Agency) Tasman.ai - Data Engineering Team Abhishek Anirudhan - Senior Data Analyst Egor Zaitsev - Sr. Software Engineer Flo Bühringer - Systems Lead Ilia Schelokov - Sr. Software Engineer Lauris Skraucis - Software Engineer Lorenzo Castro - No-Code Lead (Product Lead) Max Nussenbaum - Sr. Product Manager (Product Lead) Olga Stogova - Sr. Software Engineer Pawel Cebula - Software Engineer Pierrick d’Annoville - No-Code Architect Rachel Farley - Associate Software Engineer Rishi Tripathy - Product Manager (Product Lead) Sean Moran - Director of Product Stef Lewandowski - Director of Product Engineering Steven Schmatz - Engineering Manager Yanel Bottini - Lead Product Designer (Agency) Tasman.ai - Data Engineering Team

Principles

The values we look for in people

• Empathy and wanting to enable others
• Relentless agency and ownership
• Gives a shit
• Executional horsepower
• Don't take themselves too seriously

We hire people with good decision-making skills

• You are an adult, we trust you
  • You understand risk and get opinions of others when needed
  • You work transparently (Slack, GitHub PRs, Linear, etc.) in small steps so that people can follow along if they are interested
• All coordination and process we do is to enable you
  • If it's not enabling you let's fix it
• We'd rather fire people with bad decision-making skills than micromanage them

Opinions vs Decisions

• The rule is
  • You either make decisions or you only add opinions
    • No exceptions
• What does this mean?
  • Decisions
    • In every project (or anything else), it needs to be clear who is the lead
      • This person ensures decisions get made
        • Either by making or delegating them
    • Whenever possible the lead should be one of the people who do the work
      • It's better to fix a wrong decision if it was your own
      • They usually have most of the context
      • This also allows people like product managers to parallelize or lead a (for them) crucial project
  • Opinions
    • Everyone else (even the CEO) just adds opinions