Newsletter

April 2026 Newsletter. I still think about the teams I was part of at Yahoo and Acorns and ask the same question: how big should product development teams be now, and what is the right mix of product, design, and engineering?At Yahoo!, my Messenger team was 5 people and we supported a product that had hundreds of millions of downloads. At Acorns, we had 10x that number, but we were supporting multiple businesses within the same app. Even then, we still tried to keep it small with a single, focused PM, a shared designer, and a dedicated team of 5 devs.

April 2026 Newsletter. I still think about the teams I was part of at Yahoo and Acorns and ask the same question: how big should product development teams be now, and what is the right mix of product, design, and engineering?At Yahoo!, my Messenger team was 5 people and we supported a product that had hundreds of millions of downloads. At Acorns, we had 10x that number, but we were supporting multiple businesses within the same app. Even then, we still tried to keep it small with a single, focused PM, a shared designer, and a dedicated team of 5 devs.

In this newsletter for March 2026, I focus on software for hardware. While understanding context of use is always important when you're designing and building software, real-world usage considerations get magnified when you're working with software for physical products.