Episode Summary:
In this exciting episode, we dive into the inner workings of Tern’s engineering and product organization. CEO David Shull, alongside Molly Johnson (Product) and Brad Turner (Design), is joined by special guest and co-founder Brian, who leads Tern’s engineering team. Brian shares insights into Tern’s engineering stack, performance optimizations, and how the team balances speed and scalability while delivering features that advisors need.
Key highlights:
- Product Update: Molly shares details on the newly launched Advisor & Agent Reporting, allowing advisors to track projected sales, expected commissions, and payments over time.
- Engineering Deep Dive: Brian explains Tern’s tech stack, from Ruby on Rails to Heroku hosting, and talks about performance optimizations like speeding up trip duplication.
- Design and Product Synergy: Brad and Molly discuss how product and design teams collaborate, explaining the overlap between the roles and how both disciplines keep the user experience central to Tern’s development process.
- Listener Questions: David and Brian answer questions from the Tern Facebook group, covering topics like Tern’s future plans for funding and capitalization, as well as how design and product roles differ in a startup environment.
Key Moments:
- [00:23] – Episode Intro: David introduces the co-hosts and special guest Brian, with a fun shoutout to the Facebook group community.
- [02:31] – Molly’s Week in Review: Highlights the launch of the Advisor & Agent Reporting feature and its impact on advisors.
- [05:17] – Brad on Design Work: Updates on progress in designing the group travel feature and improvements to the trip board sorting functionality.
- [09:19] – Engineering Deep Dive: Brian discusses Tern’s tech stack, built on Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku, and the importance of simplicity and pragmatism in shipping features quickly.
- [14:06] – Performance Optimizations: Brian shares how the team balances fast shipping with performance, highlighting recent improvements in load times for complex features like trip duplication and report generation.
- [24:39] – Future Team Growth: Brian talks about Tern’s upcoming engineering hires and what he’s excited about as the team expands.
- [32:18] – Design vs. Product: Brad and Molly explain the differences and synergies between design and product roles at Tern.
- [37:52] – Getting Into Design: Brad gives advice on how aspiring designers can get started by learning design thinking, developing UI taste, and practicing with tools like Figma.
- [43:03] – Week Ahead Plans: Molly, Brad, and Brian share what they’re looking forward to next week, including big-picture strategy meetings and upcoming feature releases.
Links & Resources:
Join the Conversation:
- What songs bring back specific memories for you? Share your thoughts in the YouTube comments or Facebook group!
- Have any performance issues with Tern? Let our support team know so the engineering team can investigate!
Call to Action:
If you enjoy the podcast, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and leave a comment! We appreciate all the feedback and engagement from our growing Tern community. And if you’re interested in getting into design or product, reach out to Brad at brad@tern.travel to continue the conversation.
Keywords: Tern tech stack, Ruby on Rails, advisor reporting, travel advisor software, product design vs product management, design thinking, travel technology startups, startup engineering team growth.
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