Building Jam

This year we launched a new customer support product, 100,000+ people joined Jam, and big companies signed up entire teams! So, it was time to rethink how we welcome users to a new way of reporting & fixing bugs. Today, Jam designer, Martin, and developer, Petar, get into the details and challenges of building new onboarding flows to make it easy for anyone to start Jamming - no matter how they found it!

We discuss:

00:23 Martin’s classic lil roast of our old onboarding

02:28 Figma tour of Jam’s new onboarding flows for self-serve & ‘invite your team’

07:01 The first-ever question in Jam onboarding

08:04 Getting data from prototypes before launching to our users (community surveys & Maze)

13:20 Illustrations vs. the actual product UI to make onboarding easier

16:39 Petar gets into variations for edge cases, live from our PR environment!

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New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

Today, we’re trying something a little different! This week we hosted an awesome group of engineers w/ Cloudflare and Sourcegraph in SF for tech talks about the future of engineering w/ AI. The talks were so good - we grabbed the highlights to discuss and share them with you all!

Let’s get into it!

(00:10) Why we love hosting dev events
(01:24) Making AI work for large messy codebases - Beyang Liu, CTO at Sourcegraph
(06:23) Why S(mall)LMs are the future of AI - Tejas Kumar, AI at DataStax
(12:06) Rebuilding the terminal with AI - Zach Bai, tech lead at Warp
(15:51) 5 things we learned building AI at Jam

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New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

Every week we share the story behind building our startup. Today, Jam eng, Aidan shares how we handled migration to MV3! Dig into all the technical details with us, and the challenges of doing a complete refactor of our browser extension + rolling it out to 150k users.

We discuss:

(0:40) The biggest challenge of the MV3 refactor

(4:03) How MV3 changed our product roadmap

(4:50) Why getting Jam’s idle states for version updates was harder in MV3

(9:56) The capture eng team & the support flows they took over

(11:19) Balancing the scope & urgency of MV3 w/ building new features our users want

(12:46) Now that we’re on MV3 - what’s next for capture?

(17:06) Come work w/ us! New open role for Technical Support & QA!

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

We’re so excited about AI - not just the AI features we’re building for Jam (can’t wait to show you!) but all the great tooling that helps us move faster at our startup. So, today we’re sharing the 13 AI tools we actually use — almost every day — how we use them, and why we love them!

Let’s get into it!

(00:07) Gemini & OpenAI
(01:02) GLIF
(03:32) GitHub Copilot
(04:33) Promptfoo
(05:20) Wondercraft & Descript
(07:17) OpusClip
(08:51) Grain
(09:51) ChatPRD
(10:34) Perplexity
(11:28) Claude
(11:46) ChatGPT

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

The design team is growing! Jam’s new designer, Martin shipped a whole new UX in the Jam workspace — in his first week (🤯). So, today on Building Jam, Martin joins the podcast to share all the details and the Figma file behind the changes with you all. 

We discuss:

(00:23) Jam preview cards before & after

(02:01) How Martin arrived at the new design & why we got rid of auto-play

(06:22) Figma tour: 4 prototypes of the new Jam dashboard

(12:03) The 'mitosis', a new UI element for complex integration workflows

(14:50) Martin’s Figma graphs to show devs how elements are layered

(16:04) Why we added a new copy link + more actions to Jam cards

Here's the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv95erC8mUs

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10 AM ET. See you there!

Our biggest launch yet is a whole new product! Jam for Customer Support is the first extension-less version of Jam. We spent over 6 months building & testing it ourselves. Today we’re sharing what that was like with all of you! In this episode, the engineers, PM & designer behind Jam for Customer Support discuss the challenges & moments making this new Jam.

(00:13) Engineering challenges to capture end-user logs w/o a browser extension.
(07:07) The purple mountain + more design iterations that didn’t make it to prod
(12:50) Decisions we made to simplify onboarding
(14:10) Learnings from early access & the changes we made for GA
(17:28) A cat, Australia, and other edge cases

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

We got to chat with Tamar Ben-Shachar! She's an engineering leader at Retool, and previously led eng teams at Stripe — so we wanted to know everything. Super excited to share this conversation with you all. We get into feature launches, eng hiring, and our favorite - Tamar's definition for product readiness: done, done & done.

(0:26) What themes has Tamar noticed across exceptional engineering teams?
(2:17) What does ready mean? Tamar's "done, done, done"
(7:04) Dani wants to know how Tamar balances a high quality bar w/ scope creep
(14:01) The impact of Retool's "quality bar dashboard"
(15:32) Tamar's advice for eng hiring at startups
(20:38) Dani & Irtefa share what it was like hiring Jam's first engineer
(28:23) Building the ability as a team to say "no"
(39:07) Tamar's advice to engineers: boast about your work!

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

Every week we get to talk to product experts about our startup challenges. Now we're hitting record on those off-the-record conversations, so you can learn with us too! Today, Staff Community Manager at Vercel, Pauline Narvas, joins us to talk about how to connect w/ devs on the internet.

(00:38) Pauline's advice on building community w/ a global user-base
(6:18) Do we need a community platform? How do we choose which one?
(11:32) Forum-type platforms & why Vercel chose Discourse
(16:40) Pauline tells us how to do Jam office hours online and keep them fun
(19:46) Dani wants to start a debug support group
(21:27) How Pauline started community sessions at GitHub & what she's planning for Vercel
(24:19) Making our community a place that helps people achieve their goals
(27:06) How Pauline measures community success: like a product!
(32:09) Ian wants to know how content feeds into driving a healthy community
(34:52) Where to join Vercel's community: vercel.community

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

We're getting ready to ship 3 new AI features! So, today, 2 engineers leading AI development at Jam, Tomasz and Oskar, join the podcast to give us an update on Jam AI. We're so excited for you all to use it. And to share how we're making it, how it's going, and the tools we're using. Hope you enjoy listening!

We discuss:

(00:13) The tools we're using to build Jam AI
(02:56) Tomasz shares the challenges of non-deterministic software
(06:00) Jam's process to build AI: data, validation & a lot of dogfooding
(09:00) Irtefa's message to Jam users waiting for more AI features
(10:00) How we evaluate our prompts
(12:25) Unexpected LLM prompt hacks we've discovered
(16:22) What's the experimentation stage of AI development like at Jam?

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

It’s launch day! Which means… this is not a normal episode! We partnered w/ Cloudflare, LogRocket, Sourcegraph + 6 more awesome devtools to make a 10-tool stack, free for devs to build their ideas. So for today’s episode, we joined some of our friends from Dev Starter Pack on PodRocket, to share the details and behind the scenes of the launch.

(00:00) Intros: Beyang (Sourcegraph), Dani (Jam), Matt (LogRocket), Ricky (Cloudflare)
(01:33) Dani shares the inspiration for Dev Starter Pack: Cloudflare!
(02:34) Sourcegraph’s mission to make it so everyone in the world can code
(05:53) How to add and fix AI with the tools included in the pack
(07:24) Why we launched a 10 tool stack & the future vision of Dev Starter Pack
(09:09) Excitement about the wave of AI-native startups & more creative engineering
(16:28) Beyang explains why LLMs can’t code for production yet
(20:45) Will the AI future arrive sooner than we expect? Let’s go build it!

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!