What are the biggest engineering mistakes to avoid early on in a startup?

Kevin is the VP of Engineering at Abnormal Security, overseeing all aspects of growth and execution. In this class, he walks through the steps required to create and support a SaaS product from an engineering perspective, with a particular focus on what aspects to prioritize in the early days of your product. Kevin spent time at eBay and Quantcast prior to becoming an early-stage engineer leader at TellApart, then a Director of Engineering at Twitter.

Kevin W: Oh boy. there's so many of these that could, I could speak to. So I'll just think of a couple that come to mind for me. I think one of the biggest challenges I think that happened is especially from an engineering mindset, trying to remind yourself that you're solving business and customer problems and not interesting technical problems.

And,it can be. A constant need to remind yourself and the team to really hone in on seeing, are you working on the most [00:03:00] pragmatic problems and solving them quickly and effectively, or are starting to over-index into what makes our minds really race with excitement? When we think about solving, it seems in the most elegant or, advanced type of technical solution.

You can build the best elegant technical solution to a problem that no one has and your company will fail. So I think that's the one that really comes to mind for me as something to really think about. the other ones for me is,I think culture again is really important, I think, For any kind of company. And I think really not thinking about what is the engineering culture you want to advocate and really start building from day one is just really important. There has to be an intentional decision as well.

Up next

How do you balance between speed, quality, and cost when building a product?

Series episodes