Geoff Schwab’s resume reads like a primer in prestigious tech jobs. But after clocking several years at heavyweight institutions like Cisco, Microsoft and Amazon, he was ready for a new kind of challenge.
“I decided it was time to go back to working at a startup to have a bigger stake in the business, including having a material impact on business outcomes and building an engineering organization from the ground up,” Schwab said. “At a startup, you have a much greater impact on the business and you often see that impact immediately.”
He landed at Barn2Door, a startup that allows farmers to sell products directly to buyers through a platform that streamlines orders, payments, inventory and more.
As Vice President of Engineering, Schwab is getting a slice of that high-impact, high-growth startup lifestyle he was looking for: he’s responsible for charting the course of the company’s tech and growing the engineering and support teams. Perhaps equally as important, he’s also found a mission that resonates.
At the end of the day, we are directly helping farmers grow their businesses.”
“We have a huge opportunity ahead of us and a lot of work to do,” Schwab said. “We are providing a segment of the country with much-needed software, and access to customers they simply did not have before.”
Schwab continued: “At the end of the day, we are directly helping farmers grow their businesses. Participating in their success by building new solutions and services for an overlooked industry is very rewarding.”
Built In Seattle spoke with Schwab to find out how he’s planning on building his team, what they’re working on now and how engineers can find personal growth in a scaling company.
What are your responsibilities?
I oversee, manage and run the engineering and support teams, which includes managing all aspects of development on our platform, as well as both buyer and farmer support.
On the engineering side, this includes managing a growing team of engineers, including software development, QA and DevOps engineers. In addition to the team, I am responsible for the overall software architecture, test automation frameworks and third-party integrations. Another important aspect to my role is improving our tools, methodologies, processes and documentation to ensure they remain streamlined and as efficient as possible, enabling rapid iterative development practices.
We have a world-class support team who work closely with engineering and success teams to manage tickets, resolve real-time customer issues, submit bugs and give data-driven and qualitative feedback to the product team.
Tell us a little about the tech you’re building at Barn2Door.
The engineering team is currently focusing on two general areas of development: readiness for scale and winning with product.
To address scale, we are focused on migrating back-end core services from Heroku to a more robust services-oriented architecture (SOA) built directly on Amazon Web Services (AWS). To win with product in our SaaS vertical, we prioritize full-stack development of product features for farmers and buyers, including customer-facing features and integrations.
What’s interesting about working at Barn2Door from a technologist’s perspective?
From a technical perspective, we provide many opportunities for engineers on our teams: SQL and database management, APIs and back-end services, front-end JS and CSS, and even some infrastructure management via our AWS architecture.
We use a wide range of modern open-source technologies, and engineers work closely with the product team to provide feedback on features. Engineers at Barn2Door have ample opportunity to work on end-to-end features; become experts on key capabilities, architecture, use cases and technologies (payments, marketplace, e-commerce and inventory); and fully own their implementation.
How do the projects your team is working on affect your users?
The core services work is behind-the-scenes for our users. It’s getting us ready for massive scale, including improved performance and robustness of our transactions-based platform. The product-facing development has a direct impact on our farmers and buyers as the features they build are directly based on feedback from our users, observations of user behavior or known product needs.
Ultimately, our work to build a scalable, useful platform helps farmers selling local food direct to increase sales, save time and attract local customers.
What’s in Barn2Door’s tech stack?
- Back end: Node.js and PostgreSQL, along with third-party integrations Shippo, Mailchimp and Stripe.
- Front end: React and Redux with CSS, HTML and TypeScript.
- Testing: Mocha, Chai, plus a Selenium-based automation framework for acceptance tests written in C#.
As a tech leader, what opportunities have you found in working at a smaller company?
There is more playspace in what you build and how your team gets it done. We are not bogged down by antiquated or old-school architectures or hardware — instead, we get to make sweeping, modern decisions for our architecture, integrations, best practices and team structures.
We have many new tools and languages at our disposal. As a smaller company, we can be nimble with the code, architecture and team processes, making updates and changes as needed.
Equipped with the trust of the CEO, I am able to freely lead an engineering team with all the best practices and expertise I have learned over the years. When combined with the market opportunity and company’s core values, it amounts to a rewarding role for myself and members of my teams.
What’s your leadership strategy when it comes to scaling the team?
My management philosophy centers around ownership and accountability. I achieve this in my teams through a high-alignment, high-autonomy model (often called pods). With the pods model, we will have teams owning independent scalable services, aligned through shared goals of iterative improvement, company-wide initiatives and business priorities.
How do you encourage personal and professional growth in your team?
The nice thing about a fast-paced startup like Barn2Door is that it is hard not to grow personally and professionally. With teams having full ownership of their feature areas, they are constantly being challenged to improve and make progress. We consistently ask ourselves how we can improve our process, performance and product as we grow the team and the platform.
The nice thing about a fast-paced startup like Barn2Door is that it is hard not to grow personally and professionally.”
Barn2Door does a fantastic job with regular communications across the company, departments and teams. This means engineers have the opportunity to educate others about what they are working on, as well as learn about other teams’ goals, progress and functionality. Everyone at Barn2Door is exposed to what it means to build a software company, including the interplay between all the teams and departments.
What kind of engineer excels at Barn2Door?
Engineers who excel at Barn2Door are those who are passionate about our mission to help farmers, can deal with some level of ambiguity, and thrive in a fast-paced environment. They have to be able to learn independently and embody our core values of “humble,” “hungry,” “hardy,” “humor,” “helpful” and “heart.”
What’s next for Barn2Door?
Barn2Door is well on our way to becoming the category-defining company in SaaS for farmers. We will continue to grow the engineering team, and we have many exciting features and platform work planned to help delight our farmers and buyers, while pushing the technological envelope of scale.
