Building Jam

It’s a design episode! With Campsite! This week on Building Jam, Brian Lovin, CEO at Campsite, and Chad Pugh, Jam designer, join us to talk about what it means to build a design-led company — the path from designer to founder, designer personas, and the internal processes that make it possible to build beautiful software.

We discuss:

(00:28) Brian explains the differences b/w Designer and designer

(04:40) How Brian came to terms w/ his designer persona: what do you get excited about?

(07:24) How do you go from an idea in Figma, to building a technical product & company?

(12:04) The intention behind Campsite design + the companies leading software design trends

(14:10) Dani asks Brian what he thinks about an early Jam feature - should we bring it back?

(18:34) Irtefa makes the case for feature add-ons to keep it simple, Dani wants to implement it immediately

(19:29) Brian says we should try it & also the GitHub model - lots of customizable settings!

(22:38) Stepping into unicorn territory, Brian’s advice for hiring designers

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

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

This week on Building Jam, we get an inside look at what makes Warp’s product development unique. Founder and CEO Zach Lloyd shares how engineers are directly responsible for project outcomes (rather than PMs), the team’s thesis around building consumer-grade developer tools, and how Warp approaches the speed vs. quality tradeoff.

We discuss:

(00:52) Building consumer-grade developer tools
(03:14) What does a feature launch look like at Warp?
(07:21) Zack’s advice for deciding what to build
(10:55) Warp’s team structure: core, AI, collaboration & revenue
(14:11) Why engineers at Warp do PM-style interviews
(19:00) “Founder Mode” and trusting the team to build a product that makes people happy
(22:18) Trading notes on how Jam and Warp balance quality with velocity
(26:00) Zack tells us about what it was like when Warp (40 people) was Jam’s size (18!)
(30:46) Growth at Warp is building community and showing the product

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

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

Building our startup, we get to meet and learn from the experts behind incredible products. Now we’re sharing these behind-the scenes conversations on our podcast, so you can learn from our journey too. Today, Colin Sidoti, CEO at Clerk, joins us to talk about how they build product.

We discuss:

(00:29) The first thing we want to know: how is Clerk design so crisp and good?
(04:24) Comparing product cycles - Clerk’s demo day & Jam’s 25% guideline
(08:45) Clerk’s 1st step in product development is writing the docs and it makes so much sense!
(13:59) Team structure & hiring empathetic engineers who double as PMs
(19:00) What dev profile is the best at writing docs?
(20:55) Trading notes from when Clerk was Jam’s size (18 people!)
(24:47) Behind the scenes of Clerk’s 200X growth in January 2023
(27:59) Colin gives us advice for navigating this exciting and challenging stage of growth at Jam

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

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

We got to learn from behavioral science expert, Matt Wallaert! Over the past two decades, Matt has led behavioral science at Microsoft and Frog Design, and currently advises Fortune 500s on how to create products that help people make good changes. He joined us on Zoom for a lunch & learn - an incredible opportunity we’re excited to share with you all as this week’s episode.
 

We discuss: 

(00:24) Understanding behavioral science & how it applies to building product 

(09:05) Matt’s favorite behavioral statement from Uber + steps to create one 

(20:53) The sufficiency test: Is submitting bugs the behavior we want to change? 

(31:10) Matt recommends partnerships based on Jam’s behavioral statement 

(33:23) The #1 mistake Matt sees when companies implement behavioral science 

(35:13) The 5 behavioral archetypes for Jam bug reporting + why people buy M&Ms

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

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

Season 2 of Building Jam is all about learning from builders we admire. When we used WorkOS to build Single Sign-On for the Jam Enterprise plan, we loved our developer experience so much that we wanted to learn more. This week, CEO Michael Grinich joins us to give an inside look into what it has taken to build their product.

In this episode, we discuss:
(01:06) How does WorkOS determine what meets their quality bar?
(03:45) The importance of "the second 80%" of any project
(06:55) Internal Operating Principle: “Earn the wow”
(10:53) How to put a great product experience into words
(15:02) The quality vs. speed dilemma for startups
(19:49) How does WorkOS write docs

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

Join 125k+ happy users at jam.dev for 1-click bug reports that engineers love.

This week we’re joined by Rui and Oskar, two Jam engineers leading our internal development of AI features. Oskar shares our latest demo with Chrome's built-in AI and what it means for anyone building in the browser.

In this episode:
(00:25) What is Chrome’s Built-in AI?
(02:26) The tradeoffs between local and remote LLMs
(04:54) Oskar demos our early experiments with Gemini Nano
(09:32) Implications for what developers will build
(11:58) Why progress with AI is like a stepwise function
(14:09) How LLMs will lead to more personalization & accessibility
(20:54) Why AI raises the bar for all software development

Subscribe to Building Jam on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New episodes drop every Friday at 10AM ET. See you there!

Join 125k+ happy users at jam.dev for 1-click bug reports that engineers love.

Meet two of Jam’s newest engineers Max & Aidan! In this episode they discuss what engineering onboarding is like at Jam, plus all the “boring” parts of software development. Internal docs, codebase organization, local environments… As a company totally focused on bug capture; at Jam, these topics are our Jam!

We discuss:

(00:13) Why we love talking about the “boring” parts of eng (they’re not boring to us!)
(02:32) Finding alignment as the codebase and team get bigger
(05:06) A sneak peek at a new feature Aidan just built
(10:42) Max and Aidan debate how much DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is too much
(12:53) Dani shares the 7 different versions of Jam’s UI before we found PMF! 

The joy of building a startup is that you get to learn from a lot of different people, but usually these meetings are not recorded. In this season of Building Jam we're sharing these raw conversations where we ask the experts about our startup. This week we’re learning from Product Hunt’s Head of Growth, Jason Levin.

(00:49) Jason’s top lesson for community growth: doing things that don’t scale to connect with people.
(03:07) Our top community challenge is trying to scale as our userbase grows - so what do we do?
(07:10) The reason Jam doesn’t have a community Slack & Jason’s experience on why maybe we should
(11:33) Jason wrote a book about memes, so we asked him for advice on how to make Jam a meme (philosophically)
(16:23) Brand marketing vs. performance marketing w/ a Nike cameo
(18:49) Jason, the Head of Growth at Product Hunt, says we should embrace the cringe
(22:41) Our 3rd Product Hunt launch: Jam Genies
(29:46) Jason’s feedback on Jam’s approach to community-led growth

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

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

This is the first episode of Season 2: Learning in Public. This season we’re getting advice and sharing the raw conversations as we learn and get feedback from experts. Today, we’re bringing our own dev community questions & challenges to Lizzie Siegle, an incredible dev advocate & community leader at Cloudflare (prev. Twilio).

We discuss:

(00:00) Introducing Lizzie & season 2 of the pod
(00:25) How do we scale dev community as our userbase grows?
(04:43) Lizzie’s Twitter, making real friends & sharing about more than work
(08:18) The different sub developer communities & the DevRel vibes
(13:15) Jam Airlines: supporting more open source devs
(17:17) Brainstorming ideas for conferences, swag & more fun ways to connect w/ devs
(31:08) Lizzie’s hot take on DevRel & how to get good at it
(36:50) Lizzie breaks down what’s working for Jam & areas we can improve

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

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

This is not a normal episode. This week we’re sharing an honest internal conversation about how things are going with the podcast. The truth is, after 12 weeks, we didn’t get the results we hoped for, but we still feel excited about it. So in the spirit of sharing behind the scenes of building Jam, here’s our retro. We discuss sticking true to our vision, podcast distribution, and our new direction going forward.

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

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