Building category-defining products: Engineering insights from streaming pioneer Rob Post

Rob Post is a technology leader and startup veteran who has scaled engineering teams from zero to unicorn status at companies including Hulu, Cameo, and Quibi. He joined us for an expert session where he shared concrete strategies for early-stage founders, including building innovative products, scaling engineering teams, and creating lasting technical cultures.

Rob Post has been building streaming platforms since Netflix was mailing out DVDs. And he’s seen a lot of success since the era of movie nights straight to your mailbox — but he doesn’t credit that to his technical prowess, even though he has plenty. Success, in Post’s mind, comes from understanding and serving customer needs. This customer-first philosophy shapes his entire approach to early-stage engineering and provides clear guidelines for founders looking to build enduring companies.

Focus on product-market fit before technical perfection

For founders building early-stage products, Post emphasizes one critical principle above all else: find product-market fit. This means focusing engineering resources entirely on validating that customers want your product, rather than perfecting the technical architecture. Post defines this validation through clear success measures like usage patterns and payment data, which both indicate sustainable customer engagement. To that end, he recommends focusing on three key strategies.

1. Only invest in deep technical projects that directly benefit the business. Post draws from his Hulu experience, where they chose to focus engineering resources on video quality as a way to differentiate their product from YouTube’s. “YouTube had so much content,” he explains, “but they didn’t focus on making sure everything was really high quality.” Quality over quantity could set Hulu apart, and was therefore worth the investment.
2. Take a low-ego approach to building versus buying, and be willing to rebuild systems later if needed. He encourages founders to be practical about which systems truly need custom engineering versus which can be purchased or borrowed. This frees up time, money, and energy to be put towards the most critical aspects of the business.
3. Use mainstream technologies to enable faster hiring and team scaling. “Nobody wants to use obscure programming languages,” Post notes, and companies that do might struggle to recruit new team members. Staying mainstream accelerates both hiring and onboarding.

These foundational decisions create space for your team to focus on what truly matters: building features that customers want.

Create a customer-obsessed engineering culture

Once product-market fit is achieved, priorities should expand to include an obsession with what those top customers want. This comes from culture — but not just generic culture initiatives. Post recommends building every aspect of engineering operations with the customer in mind. “You want [your team] to really obsess over things like ‘these latency numbers look a little bit higher than usual,’” he explains.

This customer-first mindset should permeate everything from daily standups to quarterly planning. Post suggests making it a centerpiece of every engineering discussion — and going as far as plastering customer feedback on office walls. Business success metrics should tie directly to customer engagement, while team celebrations should highlight proactive problem-solving that enhances the customer experience.

Building features that thrill customers can be expensive. Post believes that technical debt is both inevitable, and necessary for rapid product validation. The key, he argues, is not to avoid technical debt entirely — but rather to manage it strategically and ensure it serves rather than impedes growth.

How to manage technical debt strategically

Post advocates for a systematic approach to handling technical debt in early-stage companies. “Always reserve a sliver of time to work on technical debt,” he suggests, recommending approximately 10% of engineering time in the very early days. However, that won’t always cut it, and eventually, technical debt might need more attention. You’ll know it’s time if and when:

• Maintenance work grows beyond 25% of engineering time
• Product teams can't deliver features in reasonable timeframes
• Customers complain about performance issues

Hiring, managing, and scaling distributed engineering teams

For non-technical founders managing engineering teams, Post emphasizes the importance of establishing clear roles while maintaining meaningful engagement. “You want to empower technologists through information and transparency to ensure the engineering teams are focused on the most important areas,” he explains. “‘Be like, Hey, I know these areas — I know the business, I know sales, I know the product vision. And I need your help to identify all the right choices we're making from the engineering perspective.’”

This transparency sets the foundation for effective leadership of technical teams. Post recommends several specific strategies:

1. Clearly define your lane and stay in it — while being transparent about your technical limitations and showing genuine curiosity about technical decisions.
2. Second, actively connect your technical leaders with external mentorship. “Talk to your board or talk to your investors through your VC firm,” Post suggests. “Say ‘Hey, I need somebody for my technologist to have as an advisor.’” Most investors maintain networks of experienced technical leaders who can mentor your team through key growth challenges.

Maintain hands-on involvement where appropriate. Post recommends choosing one or two projects monthly to dive into deeply yourself. This keeps you connected to the team's day-to-day reality without overstepping bounds. Post is a big advocate for hybrid workforces but recommends prioritizing regular gatherings in order to maintain a healthy culture. He’s a big fan of longer periods of time spent together for intensive collaboration sessions while keeping day-to-day execution at least partially remote. “As long as you can have enough of those, you can kind of cheat the challenges of remote culture,” he says. The key is creating clear ownership, boundaries, and trust that evolves as the company grows — and can scale even when work shifts across distributed teams.

The reality of scaling success

One seemingly counterintuitive insight Post shares is that as companies grow, individual scope often narrows rather than expands — with more resources and experts, responsibilities often become more specialized. This natural evolution requires careful management of team expectations and responsibilities. Success depends on helping team members embrace depth over breadth, while maintaining clear boundaries between increasingly specialized functions. Leaders need to guide this transition thoughtfully and intentionally, and ensure that engineering talent feels empowered to make an impact — even if the once-startup is a different company now.

Balancing innovation with business reality

For founders building the next generation of innovative products, Post’s experience challenges conventional wisdom about technical perfection and scalability. His approach suggests that success comes not from building the most sophisticated systems from day one, but from making pragmatic technical decisions that enable rapid customer validation. It's about creating an environment where teams can make smart tradeoffs between innovation and practicality with the customer's needs at the center, and taking a low-ego approach to rebuilding.“Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it didn't,” Post reflects on his early engineering days. “But that curiosity, that willingness to figure things out – that's what really sets up the company for success.”