The 2 Things You Ask Your Team When You Pass $1B w/ Hippo’s VP of Engineering

When you think of a billion-dollar tech company, you probably imagine rooms full of monitors with dashboards and non-stop data streams.

Well, after talking to Hippo - a certified unicorn and newly minted giant in the insurance industry - we realized this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Mike Gordon, VP of Engineering at Hippo, sat down with Dev Interrupted to chat about what it’s actually like to run the dev teams powering a company that just passed a $1 billion valuation.

His insights about what actually matters to him were amazing for how simple, focused and – brilliant – they are.

A great conversation on what’s important to a company re-writing the rules of insurance, Mike Gordon is by far one of the most thoughtful-yet-pragmatic minds we’ve had on yet.

Episode Highlights Include:

• (1:56) From West Point to VP of Engineering
• (5:22) Best thing about metrics is "Retiring dumb stuff"
• (14:32) Reducing 'extreme face time'
• (19:23) Burnup charts vs Burndown charts
• (23:56) The two most important questions
• (35:24) Mike's four 'Golden Metrics'

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