The End-to-End Engineer: How WorkOS Collapsed the Talent Stack for High-Velocity Execution, Ownership & Better Product Decisions w/ Michael Grinich

The Engineering Leadership Podcast

What if your engineering team didn’t just write code, but owned product discovery, wrote the launch messaging, and handled early sales? In this episode, Michael Grinich, CEO and founder of WorkOS, deconstructs their playbook for collapsing the product/engineering stack: no design leads, only one PM, and engineers who own product end-to-end. Michael breaks down how they teach product thinking, build with deep customer insight, and why his most important job is often to "cut scope." You’ll learn how to remove the "lossy translation layers" between teams, build a culture of curiosity and customer obsession, and ship higher-quality products, faster.

ABOUT MICHAEL GRINICH

Michael is the founder and CEO of WorkOS, a developer platform that enables companies to become Enterprise Ready through features like Single Sign-On (SAML). Their customers include many of the fastest-growing startups including Webflow, Drata, Loom, and +200 others. Before WorkOS, Michael co-founded Nylas and studied CS at MIT.

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SHOW NOTES:

• Marketing technical products exclusively to other tech companies (2:39)
• Building products end-to-end without PMs (6:36)
• How WorkOS utilizes fun, user feedback, and cohesive storytelling in their product-building process (9:31)
• Hiring engineers for curiosity & comfort operating in ambiguity (12:48)
• How engineers owning product discovery & directly engaging w/ users improve product insights (16:31)
• Using Slack for real-time integrated support & rapid product iteration (19:38)
• The complexities of creating simple, elegant products and marketing messaging (21:54)
• Cut scope ruthlessly to ship faster and better (26:20)
• Small, simple, deeply useful features make the biggest impact (30:30)
• The weekly cadence that keeps engineering aligned (32:52)
• Behind the scenes of MCP Night: A protocol party for devs (38:20)
• Rapid fire questions (41:29)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• MCP Night
• **WorkOS Launch Week**
• WorkOS AuthKit
• The Business Value of Computers: An Executive's Guide - Paul A. Strassmann addresses the practical needs of executives responsible for planning, budgeting and justifying information technology expenditures. It shows that there is no direct relation between spending on computers, profits or productivity.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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