Working at a dev infra open source startup - A view from the trenches
Community events are a great way to meet people and learn what they are upto. I was at KCD Bangalore last week and met a bunch of people. Among many conversations, one stood out. An engineer and architect turned entrepreneur was interested in hearing feedback about the new product he has been working on.
One thing that came up during the discussion was along the lines of engineers not having a good understanding of the business side of things. Constrained by resources, startups offer opportunities to learn and grow in ways that are otherwise not possible. I have decided to write a post about my experience working at SigNoz and what makes it a great place to work.
Support
Everyone who works at SigNoz is a support engineer. We have a public slack channel where we interact with the community and help them with their issues. It helps us understand the pain points and what they are looking for. Often they uncover bugs and issues that we would have missed. It also helps us understand the use cases and how people use the product.
And occasionally, a brother from another mother, from the other side of the world, drops by to say hi and ask some questions.
Customer success
Are they still called ninjas these days, or new cool term dropped? I don't know. But I do know that we have a great team who onboards new customers, helps them with their issues and makes sure they are successful. They are the ones who are in touch with the customers and bring feedback. How often do you get to work with the customers directly and understand their needs? At SigNoz, everyone does.
Bring your own PRD
When we build a feature, either an engineer working on it or one of the engineers collaborating on it writes a PRD. Writing makes you think about the problem. This is traditionally done by product managers. But we don't have one yet.
Given we are in developer tooling businesses, it is not hard to make engineers take ownership of it. There will be a lot of collaboration and feedback from the team. But the person who writes the PRD is the one who owns it and drives it to completion.
Growth
We have one dedicated fella working on growth. You can take part in the discussions and help with the growth. Content is one of the areas where engineers contribute. But you are not limited to that. You can help with the branding, website and other areas too.
Engineering
We are an engineering-first company by nature. Developers around the world love the product we are building. In their own words, it improves the developer productivity and helps optimize the latency and troubleshoot issues.
We already have users using it in the production environment and ingest tens of millions of events per second. As we scale it, there is no shortage of engineering challenges, from building highly reliable data pipeline systems to reusable and high-performant web components to scaling applications and storage systems on Kubernetes that easily handle billions of records. There is always a scope for performance improvements and optimizations. And every optimization we do, it directly benefits our users. It is still very early days, and there is a lot of work to be done.
Things that can't be categorized but should be mentioned.
- Learn about business models and pricing.
- Product analytics, reasoning and attribution.
- Experimentation and strategy.
- And more... (I will update this list as I think of more)
