Cross-functional proximity beats process

Building together is important. So having engineers, and product managers, and designers be together, have shared goals, and align on that and be able to just look over each other's shoulder and talk about things, is important.

I have never seen a company, the engineering team and the product team and the sales team are so close. That's definitely one of aha moments I had because if you're thinking about if your engineer does not really know what the market wants and if your PM doesn't really know what is actually the client's feedback, they won't be able to get a right product in the market.

When creating the growth group, we resolved this by ensuring that each of the growth teams were truly cross-functional in nature with everyone in each team aligned around common objectives and KPIs. Every team has engineers, an engineering manager, a product manager, a designer, a growth marketer, decision science support.

Canvas is one of the... I would say the first project at OpenAI, where researchers and applying engineers started working together from the very beginning of the product development cycle.

I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected.

Do you know your engineering manager's birthday? It's the day they showed up in the world. It's the most important day for them.