Building engineering orgs and new products at Segment, Dropbox & Facebook — Tido Carriero

Today’s episode is with Tido Carriero, the Chief Product Officer at Segment, a customer data platform which was recently acquired by Twilio. Before that, he built out the engineering teams that worked on the core product and the initial business product at Dropbox. Tido started out his career in 2008 as an early member of the Facebook ads engineering team, and went on to become an eng manager on the Pages team, a transition from IC to leadership that he talks about in this episode.    In today’s conversation, we dig into his career lessons from building engineering orgs and launching new product lines at several different top tech companies. From the pros and cons of single threaded leadership to his black box analogy for assessing a team’s performance, there are tons of tactics in here on how leaders can think differently about org design, planning and execution. He also shares several gems of advice for new engineering managers and new managers-of-managers.   We also chat about the path to product/market fit, especially for multi-product strategies. Tido shares his advice for going from zero to one in a new product, including the simple milestone his teams have to hit before he’ll greenlight a new project, why he prefers iterative approaches over “big bang launches,” and his thoughts on why Dropbox struggled here. (Tido shares more of his thoughts on finding product/market fit in the context of multi-product strategies here in this blog post: https://segment.com/blog/finding-product-market-fit-again/)   Tido isn’t on Twitter, but you can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson