How “Engineering-Driven” Leads to “Engineering-Supremacy”
Honeycomb has a reputation for being a very engineering-driven company. No surprise there, since it was founded by two engineers and our mission involves building an engineering product for other engineers.
We are never going to stop being engineering-driven in the sense that we are building for engineers and we always want engineers to have a seat at the table when it comes to what we build, and how, and why. But I am increasingly uncomfortable with the term “engineering-driven” and the asymmetry it implies.
We are less and less engineering-driven nowadays, for entirely good reasons — we want this to be just as much of a design-driven company and a product-driven company, and I would never want sales or marketing to feel like anything other than equal partners in our journey towards revolutionizing the way the world builds and runs code in production.
It is true that most honeycomb employees were engineers for the first few years, and our culture felt very engineer-centric. Other orgs were maybe comprised of a person or two, or had engineers trying to play them on TV, or just felt highly experimental.
