On this episode, we’re joined by Andrew Tunall, whose past roles include VP at New Relic and Technical Product Manager at Amazon Web Services. He is currently President of Embrace, where he leads the company’s product strategy and team operations. Andrew shares his perspective on observability’s growing role in modern app development, how AI is transforming product workflows, and why reliability is a core business value, not just a technical metric. We explore Andrew’s journey from a political science and economics background to leading products at high-growth tech companies.



Key Takeaways:

(02:21) Andrew took a non-traditional path into early product roles.

(09:50) Teams often miss how small performance issues hurt user engagement.

(14:59) Users blame bad internet for app issues and disengage.

(20:37) Shipping fast requires the right culture and tools, or you'll fall behind.

(25:49) Embrace stood out by adopting OpenTelemetry and redefining observability.

(30:13) Without domain expertise at the top, product culture and authenticity suffer.

(35:51) Hiring fewer, high-ownership top performers beats growing too fast.

(39:57) AI is costly and often less efficient than human pattern recognition.

Resources Mentioned:

Andrew Tunall

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtunall/

Embrace | LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/company/embrace.io/

Embrace | Website

https://embrace.io/

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

https://aws.amazon.com/

New Relic

https://newrelic.com/

Honeycomb

https://www.honeycomb.io/

OpenTelemetry

https://opentelemetry.io/

Lenny’s Podcast

https://www.youtube.com/@LennysPodcast

"Purple Cow" by Seth Godin

https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/dp/1591843170

Very Good Ventures designs and builds world-class digital experiences for any screen, with the best tools and engineering approaches for consistent, scalable results. Find out how VGV helps you hit the mark at: https://verygood.ventures/

#Apps #Flutter #AppDevelopment

On today’s episode, we’re joined by Kevin Smith and Mikel Corcuera, Co-Founders at Snipd, the AI-powered podcast app built to help capture and rediscover insights from spoken audio. Kevin and Mikel discuss the origin of Snipd, the challenges of building an AI-native product from scratch, and the role of Flutter in enabling rapid, cross-platform development.

Key Takeaways:

(01:54) Snipd lets users triple-tap to save podcast clips with AI summaries.

(05:53) Snipd utilizes AI to improve capturing podcast insights.

(14:58) Flutter enables fast, cross-platform development and a polished UI experience.

(21:43) Before ChatGPT, the team used self-hosted, fine-tuned AI models.

(26:29) The team sees AI as the new electricity, soon to be standard in everything.

(30:52) Early AI summaries were rough, but clear enough to prove the concept worked.

(36:18) AI supports unfamiliar tasks and new tools.

(41:28) Everyone codes differently — AI should fit each workflow.

(48:02) We all underestimate AI’s impact — even knowing that is a useful reminder.

(51:58) As AI boosts productivity, demand for developers grows, not shrinks.

Snipd promo link: https://link.snipd.com/Cx7S/vgv

With this link you get to try out Snipd’s Premium version for free for 1 month. Their Premium version unlocks additional AI features and more AI usage.

Resources Mentioned:

Kevin Smith

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-smith-673714b4/

Mikel Corcuera

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcorcuera/

Snipd | Website

https://www.snipd.com/

Flutter

https://flutter.dev

How to Start a Startup by Sam Altman

https://playbook.samaltman.com/

Hugging Face

https://huggingface.co/

ChatGPT

https://chatlyai.app/

Google Cloud

https://cloud.google.com/

Perplexity

https://www.perplexity.ai/

Legacy Podcast

https://open.spotify.com/show/26I6gYMMbXcgHGiZzithBn?si=06fdc37d6fc6409b

Lenny’s Podcast

https://open.spotify.com/show/2dR1MUZEHCOnz1LVfNac0j?si=60164a8453cd4cd3

Very Good Ventures designs and builds world-class digital experiences for any screen, with the best tools and engineering approaches for consistent, scalable results. Find out how VGV helps you hit the mark at: https://verygood.ventures/

#Apps #Flutter #AppDevelopment

On this episode, we’re joined by Landon Robinson, previously Senior Software Engineer at Superformula, and Mobile Lead at SteadyIQ. He is currently Staff Engineer at Etsy, where he leads platform work on the Etsy Seller app. With over 20 years in the industry, Landon brings deep experience in web, Android, iOS, and Flutter development. He shares how Etsy’s mobile team adopted Flutter to build a more efficient and scalable seller experience.



Landon walks us through the team’s unique “away team” model, how strong architecture supports cross-functional collaboration, and why focusing on business impact is essential for engineering leaders.

Key Takeaways:

(00:46) Landon’s transition from native mobile to Flutter development.

(05:10) Etsy Seller app evolved from shared native code to standalone Flutter.

(10:27) Strong engineers and solid docs keep the Flutter team effective and stable.

(14:58) Etsy’s “away team” model lets product teams build features directly.

(21:37) Etsy organizes teams by feature, enabling web and mobile builds.

(25:36) Flutter enabled faster, easier delivery of a feature-rich seller app.

(34:15) Don’t chase shiny tech, focus on solving real business problems.

(36:31) Understand the business early — it’s key to long-term growth as an engineer.

Resources Mentioned:

Landon Robinson

https://www.linkedin.com/in/landon-robinson-3b2a402/

Superformula

https://www.linkedin.com/company/superformula/

SteadyIQ

https://www.linkedin.com/company/steadyiq-total-income-verification/

Etsy | Website

https://www.etsy.com/

Flutter

https://flutter.dev

Very Good Ventures designs and builds world-class digital experiences for any screen, with the best tools and engineering approaches for consistent, scalable results. Find out how VGV helps you hit the mark at: https://verygood.ventures/

#Apps #Flutter #AppDevelopment