Discussing our Engineering Culture

Most of what we publish here is about the work: a skill, a migration, something we got wrong and fixed. This one is about how the work gets decided.

Dieter and Maarten, our CEO and CTO and both ex-DataCamp, sat down for a long conversation about what building at Conveo is actually like. It is the longest of the videos we recorded, and deliberately the least edited.

What they cover

• Hiring for product engineering. Maarten probes for it directly: what customer conversations have you had, and when someone handed you a proposed solution, did you dig for the actual problem underneath it? Both of them trace the instinct back to burning the midnight oil at previous companies on things nobody turned out to be waiting for.
• No PMs, but product management still has to happen. Maarten is blunt that this is the risk of dropping the role: the function remains necessary, nobody owns it by title, and it is easy to lose while scaling. Engineering leads and research impact leads guard discovery, and projects get a retrospective on what could have been validated sooner. The upside is a very short loop. Sit with a customer Tuesday, ship the feature Wednesday, and features get co-created with customers before launch rather than after.
• How fast the AI adoption moved, mostly in the last three months. Maarten describes a CTO cockpit he kicked off with a vision document that now iterates on itself, bug reports that get fixed automatically, and Vincent’s overnight agent mesh, the subject of Nightwatch, which has pushed the shipping rate into a hockey stick. Agents now do QA too, and by Maarten’s account better than some systems they used before.
• Seniority cuts both ways. The team hires very senior people, and fifteen years of hard-earned habits are exactly what can leave you stuck. There are no settled best practices for any of this yet, so the counterweight is a growth mindset and relentless experimentation, including a weekly session where engineers bring what they tried, some of which fails. The hiring bar moved with it: less “read this codebase and change it quickly,” more can you direct a fleet of agents and distill requirements. Ex-engineering-managers tend to do well at it: an agent will not get it right first time either, and improving the guidance so it does better next time is close to what coaching already is.
• Engineering spreads past the engineering team. The go-to-market side runs on one internal app covering the whole funnel instead of a CRM plus a marketing tool plus a warehouse, so a feature a customer asked about six months ago can trigger an outreach the day it ships. There is an engineer embedded in the people team doing the same for hiring.