Chats with Kent C. Dodds

Foundations, feedback, and agents — Dillon Mulroy on product at Cloudflare


Listen Later

Dillon's path runs from internal insurance tools to Vercel Domains to Cloudflare's agent and dashboard work-always with the same through-line: care about the user, get real feedback, and invest in primitives so delighters don't collapse under bad foundations. This episode covers metrics and paging as a product habit, learning from customer escalations, scoping small when AI speeds up coding, and building cross-functional relationships (support, sales, finance) as part of engineering judgment.

You'll hear practical parallels with episodes on delighters and onboarding tension, plus why reviewing agent-written code still matters for system intuition when things break at 2 a.m.

Homework
  • Try hard and care a lot; more practically, focus on foundations and primitives.
  • Put good feedback systems in place so you know what's going on with your product and where it doesn't feel good-alerting and metrics, customer journey signals, or customer interviews.
  • If you have a customer support team, sit with them and watch them triage cases for your product; get to know support-they're sitting on a gold mine of product signal-and empathize with them like you do with users.
  • Kent's shorthand for the mindset Dillon agreed with: make pain painful-if your users are hurting, you should feel it too.
  • Resources
    • Cloudflare - Developers
    • Cloudflare Agents
    • Dillon Mulroy - site
    • Dillon Mulroy - GitHub
    • Guest: Dillon Mulroy
      • Company: Cloudflare
      • GitHub: @dmmulroy
      • X: @dillon_mulroy
      • Host: Kent C. Dodds
        • Website: kentcdodds.com
        • X: @kentcdodds
        • GitHub: @kentcdodds
        • Youtube: Kent C. Dodds
        • Video

          Watch this episode on YouTube

          ...more
          View all episodesView all episodes
          Download on the App Store

          Chats with Kent C. DoddsBy Kent C. Dodds

          • 4.8
          • 4.8
          • 4.8
          • 4.8
          • 4.8

          4.8

          16 ratings