Karri Saarinen

Effective design reviews involve project 'sponsors' who provide high-level feedback on the 'why' and the core concept during live demos.

"I still run the design team, so I do see some of the designs on a weekly basis and then, or one of the other co-founders or head of product, we are basically the sponsors for the projects. So then we..."

The final stage of a design review should be a hands-on 'stress test' by a leader to ensure the execution matches the vision.

"But then before we are launching it, I might just go in and try it out and try the different states and click it around. And sometimes I find things... I just captured those things and send it to the..."

Product-market fit is not binary; it is a spectrum that should be measured and achieved segment by segment.

"For us, the way we think about is, 'Do we have the fit in the specific segments?' And how strong that fit is. In the company's journey, the first year, we just focused on, 'Can we get the fit...' In t..."

A 'pay what you want' slider can serve as a low-stakes experiment to gauge willingness to pay before setting a fixed price.

"At some point we started building the payments function, so we just added a page in the settings that you can optionally pay. Then we just give you a slider that's, how much do you want to pay per sea..."

Probing the 'why' behind past decisions reveals a candidate's product sensibility and critical thinking skills.

"I often think ask people that... Ask about their projects and I try to go deeper. It's like why was this decision made? Why do you think the decision was made? And I might ask, 'Do you think it was th..."

Limiting headcount growth preserves team quality and prevents the chaos associated with rapid scaling.

"We've been taking very slow steps on it that in almost the first year we didn't hire anyone... We never more than doubled in a year. And that's been our guideline that we shouldn't more than double."

A paid work trial is the most effective way to evaluate how a candidate actually operates in a startup environment.

"We do with all of the employees, we've been doing a paid work trial... they basically come as a mini contractor to the company, and we give them a very usually fairly vague problem statements. If you'..."

Product quality and craft must be an explicitly stated and shared value among founders to permeate the rest of the organization.

"I think with the craft it always starts with people need to care about it. If it's not valued in the company, then it's very hard for anyone to do because people don't feel like it's valued."

Remote teams can build culture through shared, synchronous activities that focus on craft and personal interaction rather than work tasks.

"Since we are a fully remote and distributed company... we decided, 'Maybe we do something like that,' where basically, we would just pick a recipe... Then we just tell people, 'Go buy the ingredients,..."

High-quality execution occurs when small, autonomous teams of engineers and designers have full ownership of a feature without excessive middle management.

"I think a lot of that, this craft for us happens when we give the project team this ownership and the project team is just engineering and design. Then, when they start building that feature they star..."

Project leadership should be a fluid assignment based on the project's needs rather than a fixed management title.

"Yes, for every project there's a project lead. That lead can be engineer or designer. It's not a formal role or it's not based on your whatever level... It's more like an assignment that now you are r..."

Brand is the sum of every interaction a customer has with the company, from the landing page to customer support.

"To me, I think the brand should be always authentic and it should, I think even if people can't articulate it, if people start to feel like something is off... you create it over time by the things yo..."

A long private beta with selective onboarding allows for iterative bug fixing and ensures the product works for a specific segment before scaling.

"We were in this private beta stage for almost a year... We invited people based on... We invited more smaller companies using the tools we currently supported. And then also I was trying to see who is..."

Authentic, founder-led announcements resonate more with early adopters than polished corporate marketing.

"With our announcement, we wrote it more direct or authentic to us like, 'This is what we're going to do and this is why, and these are some of the things we're going to do.' On a Twitter, we did the s..."

Opinionated software increases user productivity by removing the cognitive load of configuration and workflow design.

"I personally have this belief that productivity software should be, and especially company software should be opinionated... Being opinionated, I think the value it provides people is you don't have t..."

Using automated, time-bound cycles helps teams ignore the 'infinite backlog' and focus on a small set of immediate priorities.

"The cycles is just a way to say that for the next week or the next two weeks or whatever timeframe, we are going to work on these things and these other things we think are the priority or the focus f..."

Prioritization can be simplified by categorizing tasks as 'Main Quests' (core value) or 'Side Quests' (distractions).

"Internally, we also talk about this, you knowing RPG games, you have the main quest lines and then you have the side quest lines. And we often talk about the companies avoid the side quests. There's a..."

Focusing on problem-solving rather than arbitrary metric targets prevents teams from optimizing for the wrong outcomes.

"In terms of specific features, we don't have goals for those... We just think that there should be features that help companies and sometimes we can look at the metrics before we start working on it....."

Shipping early to an internal environment allows for real-world testing and iterative refinement that static designs cannot provide.

"We actually believe that when you start building the thing you actually start realizing more how it should work and how it should be better. A lot of times with the teams we tell them, 'Just put it th..."

A significant portion of the interview focuses on building a culture that relies on intuition and customer empathy rather than data-driven experimentation and A/B testing.

"Then we think you can much more use your intuition or thinking to do those decisions so you don't have to use data or metrics to back those things up."