July 15, 2025

Mob Programming at a Startup: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned

49 minutes

In this episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we sit down with Taimoor Imtiaz—CTO at a fast-moving, bootstrapped startup—for a raw, insightful dive into how his small dev team applied mob programming, trunk-based development, and GitHub Flow to accelerate delivery without sacrificing code quality.

Taimoor shares the journey of how his team transitioned from traditional PR-based workflows to real-time collaboration in mobs. Along the way, they faced timer-switching friction, monorepo challenges, and the trade-offs of scaling extreme programming practices in a production environment.

If you’ve ever wondered how mob programming plays out in a high-pressure startup setting—or whether trunk-based development is viable outside of big enterprise environments—this conversation is for you.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

How GitHub Flow can be adapted for trunk-based development

Why mob programming improved debugging and reduced defects

Where mob timebox timers went wrong—and what the team did about it

The real impact of developer experience and culture on delivery speed

Lessons learned from using a monorepo in a fast-growing codebase

Using extreme programming when resources are tight

Whether you’re a startup CTO, team lead, or individual contributor looking to evolve your team’s workflow, this episode offers real-world insights into modern software development practices that actually work under pressure.

Video and Show Notes: https://youtu.be/yTbzycv9qw4

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