Focus, Culture, and Metrics in a Remote-First World w/ Chris Brookins of Appcues

**Dan Lines** (0:00)
Engineering leaders across the globe are struggling with how to manage engineering focus time in remote work environments. That's why we've brought in Chris Brookins, VP of Engineering at Appcues, to break down how he's rebuilding his engineering organization to optimize for a remote workforce, and how they're using metrics to create a culture of continuous improvement.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:25)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB.
Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity. Sign up free at linearb.io.

**Dan Lines** (0:40)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today we are talking about the Appcues engineering organization.
Joining me today is the VP of Engineering at Appcues, Chris Brookins. Chris, thanks so much for joining the pod today.

**Chris Brookins** (0:57)
Yeah, great to be here, Dan.

**Dan Lines** (0:59)
So we got a lot of good things that we're going to talk about on the show today, but I think where we should start is just a little bit about Appcues. What is it and what does it do?

**Chris Brookins** (1:10)
Sure.
Yeah, so Appcues is a platform that we deliver to thousands of SaaS companies, and they use it to design these beautiful in-app experiences to influence their users' behavior without writing any code. Companies like LogMeIn, SegmentLift, ProfitWell, Amplitude, and you guys, embed Appcues to improve your products UX and grow their business.

**Dan Lines** (1:38)
Yeah, at LinearB, we are definitely an Appcues user, great product, use it all the time. Let's talk a little bit about your engineering organization. So how many engineers do you have on the team now?

**Chris Brookins** (1:50)
Yeah, so right now we have 19 engineers on the team and 25 overall in engineering and product.

**Dan Lines** (1:57)
Okay, great. And what has the growth been like for you over the past year or so?

**Chris Brookins** (2:03)
Yeah, we've been growing a lot recently. For example, in Q1, we just added five engineers to the team.
And yeah, we're going to be growing by seven more in the next, you know, three to four months. So getting up to about 32 folks total in the teams.

**Dan Lines** (2:21)
Starting to get up there a little bit. So how is your engineering or structure, you know, thinking about teams and how you separate them and who's on what team?

**Chris Brookins** (2:32)
Yeah, so we have four empowered product teams, we call them, each with their own mission, clear ownership over various areas of the product. Two of those teams develop customer-facing experiences, and two of them provide more back-end platform services. One of those platform teams is, you know, in charge of like data ingestion and processing and our event pipeline, analytics. And the other platform team is security focused. Security is very important to us. So SOC 2 compliance, that kind of stuff.
On the more customer experience oriented teams, they're mostly front-end engineers.
Our tech sec is React, but you know, it's cross-functional. So we have product manager, designer, quality assurance, and front-end engineering all on that team.

**Dan Lines** (3:18)
Okay, great. Yeah. Thanks for diving in there. And what are you doing from like a DevOps perspective? Do you have DevOps people? Are they baked into the teams themselves? Is it a separate team?

**Chris Brookins** (3:29)
Yeah. So we have what that security teams actually call it, we recently renamed it DevSecOps. And they're focused on kind of creating tooling that all the other teams can use to move faster. We're refining our pipelines, our infrastructure as code work, all of that. But the bottom line is, is that they empower these other teams to do what they need to do to deploy multiple times a day behind feature flags, to create infrastructure on their own in AWS.
All the teams are deploying on their own and that one central group is just trying to take it to the next level in terms of velocity transparency, that kind of thing.

**Dan Lines** (4:07)
Yeah, good, good setup. I think a pretty standard setup for a more modern organization, right? It's good that you're not kind of in that old school mode. Each team can only do one thing and nobody can deploy, right? So, you know, you're definitely totally on the right track there. What are you using for development methodology like Scrum, Kanban, something I've never heard of?

**Chris Brookins** (4:32)
So two of the teams practice Scrum, two-week iterations, you know, just to kick off with a retro of the previous iteration, do planning, groom the backlog halfway through and then do it again in two weeks.