Introducing Deploy

Welcome to Deploy, our goal is to share the lessons we learn while building our product, our team, our culture, and Pipe. No two companies are alike – and over time, no one company remains the same. We believe that the path of any successful company is carved by its unique combination of customer needs, team, and environment. As we build Pipe, we hope to share stories that will be of use and interest to anyone taking a similar journey.

Since Pipe started at the end of 2019, we've gone through many evolutions. We've grown our team from a handful to just over 100 people, working remotely across 19 states and 13 countries. We've experimented with LightMode, sprints, offsites, design systems, Kubernetes, and more. And we've helped some wonderful customers scale by giving them access to capital without requiring them to give up any equity. The market has gone up; the market has gone down. The tide has come in and gone back out*. We've grown through it all by viewing everything we do as a work in progress. And as we've experimented, we've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't.

Although Pipe has grown faster than any of us could have hoped, it's not because we explicitly planned it that way. It happened because we planned to build a team of incredibly talented and dedicated people who think critically about our company's goals and adjust as needed to make sure that we're always improving our product experience. As a fully distributed and remote product and engineering team, we've naturally aligned around a culture of resilience, collaboration, and compassionate communication.

It's as common for team members to delegate responsibility as it is for us to step up and make a decision to try something so we can move forward even without 100% agreement. Disagree and champion - we like to say. We plan ahead; we learn and always reflect afterward. The details of these decisions, and the lessons that come with them, are what we'll be talking about in Deploy.

Deploy will be home to anecdotes, stories, how-tos, conversations, and more—written by and with our team of Plumbers*, for prod-eng practitioners everywhere. Our goal is to publish anything that we think would have helped us had we been able to read it while building Pipe, and we hope you'll follow along.

* (we can't explain that!)
* (yes, we know – but consider the alternative!)

What would you like to hear from the Pipe Prod-Eng team about? Let us know here or on Twitter.