Matt McKeon

While some folks hire entire Figma design teams for their personal websites, I'm here at 6:30 AM explaining to my partner why I need a third coffee to "write stuff." 2022: "I'll share monthly insights about building companies!" 2024: checking it -> Writing consistency matches crypto winter performance 📉 But look - AI got better at English faster than I got better at writing. That's what we call product-market fit. New strategy for 2025 - Actually write 12 articles - Convince partner these dawn coffee raids are essential business ops Track my progress (or lack thereof) here: https://lnkd.in/e6bkkxvH P.S. If my partner reads this - yes, this is exactly what I'm doing at 6:00 AM either wiring or reading the book. Note: Will open source my coffee consumption metrics in Q3 2025. Full transparency, like web3 promised.

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Anyone have a book or blog recommendation for helping engineers have better opinions on UX? Engineers are required to have dozens of opinions on small UX decisions throughout the week, and I'm looking for tactical advice for people already familiar with how software works. I'm not talking about Don Norman, or The Lean Startup, or Marty Cagan: I don't want frameworks for thinking about UX, and I don't want help understanding what UX is. Those have their own value, but there has to be something out there that's more directly tied to digital design decisions. Any blogs, books or other media that really transformed how you, as an engineer, think about the user?

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This is not just any "hey, we are looking for a dev" post. This might be one of the most exciting engineering roles we have ever hired for. Let me explain why: I have the great privilege of being the product lead for the exceptionally brilliant Rendering Engine Team at Miro. Several months ago, we took a bold step to revamp our foundational rendering technology from the ground up, setting an ambitious vision far beyond what Miro is capable of today. Building a highly performant rendering engine for a product like Miro is not trivial though. You are dealing with an infinite 2D canvas with potentially thousands of multimedia objects, all while multiple people collaborate in real-time. We want professionals & creatives to spend the majority of their working days in Miro. Unfortunately, every lag when panning a large planning board, every jiggle effect due to low FPS when zooming out from a large planning session, and every slight delay when selecting hundreds of multimedia objects not only results in lost time but also slight frustration. It's that small, annoying feeling that something felt slightly slow, slightly not instant, slightly irritating. A products performance is not just about the time you lose; it is about the feeling this product gives you. On the other hand, we all know the feeling of delight when you do something complex in a product, and it happens instantaneously. That feeling that no matter what you do, no matter what workload you throw at an application, it will be responsive, fast, and instantaneous. This is what we envision: A rendering engine that continuously surprises you with its snappiness, making work feel light and delightful. We are looking for someone who is as equally annoyed by these issues as we are and wants to take the lead in solving them. We aim to build a rendering engine that raises the bar for what people consider possible on a web-based canvas. A computer graphics professional who wants to take on the challenge of working on a renderer that powers the day-to-day work of millions of users and some of the most creative and innovative companies in the world. If you work in the field of computer graphics and want to contribute to the heart of a product that aims to amplify collaboration and creative work, give it shot. Feel free to DM me for more information or directly apply below:

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Stop calling it technical debt. We’re not fixing old code - we’re investing in our platform's future. As product leaders, we often struggle to get buy-in for these critical improvements because we're telling the wrong story. Here's what transformed our customer conversations: Instead of talking about refactoring legacy systems, we shared how we're strengthening our foundation to unlock new possibilities. Rather than discussing system complexity, we focused on how our platform investments directly improve reliability and speed. The magic happened when we stopped apologizing for maintenance and started showcasing the long-term vision. Our customers don't care about our code - they care about growing their business, staying competitive, and reducing risks. The key is simple - translate technical challenges into business opportunities. Customers want to hear about outcomes, not operations. #ProductLeadership #TechnicalStrategy #CustomerSuccess #ProductManagement

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Last Tuesday, Malsgufa, our legacy CMS backend, was shut down. This milestone for BI's Tech and Product team culminated years of planning, effort, and execution. Malsgufa's first commit was on July 25, 2014, leading to 5,186 commits across nearly 30 repositories. Built and maintained by scores of engineers, its deprecation represents significant cost savings (20 production replicas, 3 instances of Solr, and an insane number of Zookeeper instances!), reduced security risk, and the elimination of an often-blamed boogeyman. The journey began in January 2020. Our challenge: moving traffic off Malsgufa without rebuilding everything in Muse. Initially, we tried GraphQL as an intermediary between Viking and our services, but progress was limited by Viking's complex Angular/Vue architecture. In January 2023, we pivoted to the strangler fig pattern with a shim. This approach proved far more effective – all Malsgufa traffic went through the shim first, with verbose logging to track unhandled requests. Meanwhile, we built Story Versioning API (SVAPI), incorporating lessons learned from Malsgufa's limitations around history and publishing states. We ran four major migrations (stories, custom pages, slideshows, and videos), building support in Muse and shimmed compatibility for Viking. Traffic gradually decreased from a torrent to a trickle, leading to the gloriously uneventful shutdown. Next, we will deprecate Viking by Q2 2025, unifying our users in the Muse ecosystem to create the industry's most innovative CMS. Special thanks to the entire Story Creation team: Chase Gruber, Chris Speziale, Daniel Arita, Danny Feliz, Dasha Lary, Dawin Camillo, Eric Saam, Frederica Chen, John Laslo, Kelly Filush, Morgan Cohn, Sarah Pai, Tyler Greenfield! Thanks also to DaD, Engagement, Helpfulness, Cloud Engineering, Test Engineering, and Operational Excellence! Finally, we recognize Malsgufa itself. Developed as a unified CMS backend to support Business Insider's expansion into new markets, it served our global newsroom reliably for a decade, publishing millions of stories despite no major changes in recent years. While it became less sustainable as our business evolved, it deserves our respect. Thank you, Malsgufa. May you rust in peace.

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"Your main job is to make your product win." I think this should apply to any product that your company makes. I also like what he says following this statement about what is NOT your main job. I will summarize here: "Your main job is not to make your manager happy, it is not to make execs happy." Also, note, this main job doesn't only apply to PMs, but also to senior Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Designers. #makeyourproductwin #leadership

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It's interesting to me how much overlap there is between design system work and digital accessibility when it comes to solving some of the stickier "meta" challenges, like getting buy-in, educating individual contributors, incentivizing adoption, and measuring impact. I've been in many different conversations that attempt to solve these things that have more to do with organizational strategy and convincing leaders that our work is valuable than they do with our actual craft. It makes think about a story I heard when I was at Shopify when they were talking about their early days. People in the office didn't clean up after themselves in the kitchen. They tried different things (I'm sure we've all seen a, "Your mom doesn't work here" sign posted on the wall of a kitchenette) and none of them worked until they found a solution that addressed human behaviour. Humans are drawn to paths with the least resistance. Removing the obstacles on the way to adoption is something I'm thinking about lately. What are the reasons teams and leaders resist things that will improve their products and their processes? Are there ways to solve some of these using tech itself, the same way a dishwasher can solve a messy kitchen problem? #DigitalAccessibility #Accessibility #A11y #DesignSystem #DesignSystems #ChangeManagement

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Another treat 🍬 from John Cutler for org design enthusiasts. I had this one on my "to-listen" list for a few weeks and it didn't disappoint. Together with Peter Merholz they touch on the place of design and research with modern product management, the emergence of a "new" way of modeling product organizations, and the challenges design leaders may face under that model. But the real surprise was them regularly mentioning... engineering! On a design-focused podcast... About product management... Heresy, I know! It's honestly refreshing to see all three being evoked on an equal footing. This is the kind of cross-disciplinary perspective that is heavily missing from most product-related content over the past years. trying to figure out how to bridge engineering and design on a day-to-day basis has been a central thread in my career, and some of the conversations really resonated with me: "You’re doing some form of participatory design. The designer's mind is sort of semi being blown by these engineers, not necessarily being great designers, but surfacing really, really interesting possibilities that technology can do. The product manager is just blown away by everyone. And then the engineers are like, wow, okay, that’s why you are paid to be a designer. At the end of the day, so that kind of working side by side in those activities, I’ll just always remember how the mutual respect meter just went through the roof. Instead of talking and telling we were doing together." "Look to engineering, because… This is fascinating to me. All the org design stuff happening in engineering now, trying to sort of refactor the orgs so they can move faster and be more customer-centric, that will ultimately define a lot of the ways design works and can work and how quickly you can ship and how fast you can learn and the feedback loops in your company... Don’t underestimate what engineering is doing in these efforts, because it may have a huge impact on how you can work later on. And a lot of great work is happening in engineering around that." There are many more nuggets like this, but just another powerful one to finish (it seems like common sense, but somehow it so rarely is the case): "What if we apply the same principles that we do to our external customers, to our teams? And that’s basically what, when I talked about thinking about in socio-technical systems and reducing cognitive load. So for example, if a design leader comes up and says, you know, I want it to feel effortless for our teams to work together, and for us to collaborate and for us to do these things yeah, that might not seem like it’s advocating for the customer out, but it’s advocating for the customers internally and that’s a common sphere."

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🤔 Looking at YC's latest Request for Startups struck me: Every category—gov tech, manufacturing, fintech, space—has AI humming under the hood. 🔄 Maybe it's not about having AI (like it's not about "having electricity" ⚡). It's about reimagining whole industries with it. 🚀 Checkout the whole article: https://lnkd.in/gcQkKMja

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These are some great thoughts on engineering metrics; I agree with much of this. Metrics have always been a great way for me to identify areas for conversation within the team itself and as an engineering executive looking across teams.

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This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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Accessible, Inclusive, Safe, Secure, Sustainable, Reliable, Resilient, Transparent, Independent, Human-centred. "We need a web by and for humans". humanewebmanifesto.com What an important and necessary project by Michelle Barker. Read & share!

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"In solving the specific problem of their function, they had lost sight of the holistic forest through the trees. I've observed companies where the product or design org and the engineering org have their own core model. The models use completely different languages; they don't interact with each other, and no one speaks the same language. They do this because there's a lot of pressure on each org to produce something, and collaborating cross-functionally is difficult. Meanwhile, the business is searching for one simple model to rule them all, which doesn't really exist. As a result, without a viable alternative, the company uses metrics like revenue and NPS (a travesty of statistics and research)." https://lnkd.in/gbk48eS7

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The heavyweight era was myopic with "on time/within budget". That's why the software never did what users needed. Agile ended up over-subscribed to speed. Quotes like "twice the work in half the time" spread this problem. I hope we can finally focus on completing feedback loops with modern software delivery. I've written this up on TNS. #Agile #DevOps #ContinuousDelivery

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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Y'alls know accessibility is important to me, and that comes in a lot of forms! I wanted to share out two things I've been working on recently that follow the a11y theme, with Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) right around the corner: First, plugging the work we've been doing at Ro around building technology to give patients more access to healthcare so they can achieve their health goals via Patient Intake. Intake isn't "just a form" - it's the key way for patients to communicate their health history, goals, and preferences to their providers in a way that feels human. Behind the scenes, we're making sure every piece of information a patient provides is structured to make sure every point is seen and heard so that our providers can deliver the best possible personalized care. More info on the platform here: https://lnkd.in/gC4ru5ip Second, the lovely Elliot Kipling and I caught up on the Enginears podcast last month around healthcare accessibility and digital accessibility in general. The episode dropped today, check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gbGcBvsB

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Quarto v1.6 was just released! 🎉 As someone who works with Quarto a lot, two features in this release are game-changing: 📝 _brand.yml Support Define your organization's branding once, deploy it everywhere - from HTML docs to presentations. Your brand stays consistent across HTML, Typst PDF, RevealJS slides, and dashboards without juggling multiple theme files! 🎯 Contents Shortcode Write your code once and display its output anywhere in your document. Finally, you can structure your narrative exactly how you want without fighting with code chunk placement. The release includes other nice improvements (landscape mode, better RevealJS navigation), but these two features are transformative for my workflows. Interested in learning more? Check out: 📚 Full release notes: https://lnkd.in/eM_6XWDq 🎨 An unofficial implementation of Stanford's identity guidelines: • Live demo: https://lnkd.in/g-x5y6CV • Source code: https://lnkd.in/ghCDWYqg 📖 Get started with brand.yml: https://lnkd.in/eTeT-qnR #quarto #rstats #python

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