Coming up on my one-year anniversary here at GetOut, I can't help but reflect on my nearly 25 years in software.
I've seen engineers without a voice in how they work.
Without ownership of how they build.
Governed by processes designed by people who don't do the work.
Optimized for visibility instead of velocity.
Measured by presence instead of progress.
I've also seen what happens when you flip every one of those.
Since the launch of two combined platforms in March 2026 (which is the result of merging two businesses):
- Smiles created: Over 6,000,000
- App requests served: Over 60,000,000
- Standups in 1 year: 8
- Meetings about meetings: 0
- Meetings per week: ~2
- Slack messages rehashing meetings: 0
- Meetings rehashing Slack: 0
- Meetings rehashing tickets: 0
Your Playbook Vs. Ours.
In the beginning, there was Work. Work looked upon itself and said, "This is too efficient. We must discuss."
And thus, the Meeting was born.
But the Meeting grew lonely. "How shall attendees know what to discuss if we do not first gather to discuss what we shall discuss?" And so the Pre-Meeting emerged, blessed with an agenda that read simply: "Align on alignment."
Yet perceived chaos still reigned. For how could the Pre-Meeting proceed without a Slack thread? And should that thread not have its own channel? And should that channel not have a weekly sync to review the slack channel messages, citing the ticket messages, which stem from the standup meeting?
- 9:00 AM - Standup to recap yesterday's meeting about the Slack thread
- 9:15 AM - Slack huddle to discuss items already discussed in the standup
- 9:45 AM - Pre-meeting to align on the 10:30 meeting to discuss the items from Slack, which discussed the items from standup
- 10:30 AM - Meeting (CANCELED: Rescheduled to discuss rescheduling)
- 11:00 AM - Slack huddle to discuss items already discussed in the pre-meeting, wherein the items from the Slack huddle were discussed, which were items discussed in the standup
- 1:00 PM - Slack message asking for an update already given in ticket comments, discussed in the huddle, covered in the pre-meeting, aligned in the meeting, sourced from the standup
- 1:15 PM - Slack message asking why execution is slow
- 2:00 PM - Finally have time to work but after 10 pings requesting you answer the 1:15 PM question, you respond: "Because we're too busy discussing items we already discussed that were previously discussed from before, wondering when we can actually get something done."
- The cycle begins anew tomorrow at 9:00 AM!!
How We Build
- Trust through autonomy.
- Write it down once and read it (Wild concept!)
- Ask questions and work with stakeholders.
- Protect our time because it is worth something.
And what happens?
At GetOut, in under a year, this means over 60 million requests served in order to help create over 6 million smiles. And we only needed 8 standups. Eight.
No meetings about meetings. No Slack threads relitigating meetings, wherein we are discussing the updates to tickets which have the latest updates in comments.
Just people... building. shipping. smiling.
❤️
Jake