TLDR Inc

I was the first hire at TLDR Inc, a business intelligence company developing novel natural language processing techniques to identify language trends in the market and providing insights into how different brands were being represented in the media landscape. My relationship with the idea behind the company actually began during my time with my startup OokTech, but due to COVID I had to step away from the project for a time.

While at TLDR I...

  • Brought two products to market over a year
    • Architected and implemented the frontend and supporting backend services
    • Worked with the product owner to continuously iterate on the base designs, leveraging rapid prototyping to prove out ideas and identify flaws quickly.
    • Continuously worked to improve deployment strategy with the operations manager.
    • Refined and documented the backend data API to permit more flexibility and better align its capabilities with business needs
    • Used lessons learned from first release to vastly improve the second
  • Built human-friendly tools for visualizing and parsing large datasets
    • Designed and built visualizations that scaled to 100,000+ item datasets while still being performant and relevant to the user
    • Engaged in empathetic design, using natural sequences of operations and manipulations to help the user tell their story
  • Actively engaged in product design
    • Conceptual goals, visual design, and user experience considerations
    • Leveraged a balance of collaborative "brainy" design with building rapid "real" prototypes to identify the unknown edges in our understanding
  • Developed timelines to align resources with business needs
    • Coordinated with stakeholders to establish requirements
    • Allocated developer resources to ensure unknowns were identified early
    • Adapted to changing requirements/understanding as the products matured
  • Worked directly with users
    • Developed onboarding technical documentation
    • Provided direct support to new customers
    • Solicited feedback to align our business's understanding of the domain
  • Remained flexible in the face of unknown developments
    • Ensured that my designs would be adaptable as our understanding of the domain matured
    • Provided alternative solutions to technical and logistical problems that arose during development and launch

My Role

Our product team was very small; I was one of two developers (the other being a founder), with support from an operations guru, a data analyst, a project manager, and the product designer. As a result, I had extensive reach in both responsibilities as well as influencing design and architectural decisions - my previous relationship with the founding IP, as well as our team's culture of knowledge sharing, played a large part in supporting this.

My official role was that of frontend developer, developing the data manipulation and visualization tools that served as the core interface to our data, as well as essentially every other customer-facing portion of our product. In addition to that role I also managed backend services, deployments (with the support of our operations manager), database configurations, and many other tasks. It was a great place to be able to leverage my experience across the stack and knowledge domains to keep things moving fast.

I had the support of a fantastic team, in particular a product owner/designer who provided fantastic starting materials to design against, as well as welcomed suggestions and collaboration. Collectively we founded a culture of mutual respect and honesty, and I am honored to have worked with them.

My Key Takeaways

The small team and wide berth of responsibility that come with being a first hire made for a unique and rewarding experience, both personally and professionally. I greatly appreciated the effort and talent that we all shared toward a common goal, and how much we fostered a respectful and supportive culture. I would not have been nearly as successful, nor have learned as much as I did, without the support of my team. While there were too many lessons to list, these are some of the key points I took away from my time with TLDR.

Going from Zero to One

I've built many projects, and deployed several to customers, but not with the same level of granular involvement in each step of the process I experienced here. Being able to start from scratch, build a product, and then put it into customers hands was a hugely rewarding and enlightening experience. Doing it twice, and having the second time go significantly faster and with far fewer hiccups, was a major validation that I have a better understanding of where the true difficulties lie and that I am capable of carrying these lessons forward.

Architecture + Longevity

As an initial hire, I had huge latitude in how I implemented the product. To temper that, the product likewise had a lot of latitude to evolve as we better understood our audience and use case. This placed me in an interesting place because I had no guarantee that any choice I made would hold up to the test of time. Over time, however, I learned that my choices (largely) did indeed hold and proved to be flexible enough to survive several major external disruptions. For those choices that wound up not being tenable, I found that they had at least bought myself and the business time to better understand the shape of the problem - and that their successors were made more obvious as a result. I think the strategy of quickly iterating, even if the domain is not entirely known, is crucial to developing a more complete understanding. And be prepared to throw away the bits that don't work - but in their absence, the shape of a solution may appear.