Today, my guest is Beau Lebens.
You guys are in for a real treat.
Beau is the Head of Product Engineering for Jetpack at Automattic. Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, which currently powers 1/3 of the web.
Beau was employee #35 at a company that is now a staggering 855 team members and counting. Automattic is valued north of $1B and operates as a 100% distributed team.
Beau started coding back as a teenager while growing up in a small town in Western Australia. But as his skills & experience continued to grow, his travels brought him to Hawaii, San Francisco, Brooklyn and now Denver, Colorado.
He oversees what I believe to be one the most dynamic product teams in the world. And in this episode there’s a ton of takeaways, from understanding the seemingly “unscalable” hiring process all the way to what is arguably the most robust tech stack I’ve ever seen for a distributed team.