Dillon's path runs from internal insurance tools to Vercel Domains to Cloudflare's agent and dashboard work-always with the same through-line: care about the user, get real feedback, and invest in primitives so delighters don't collapse under bad foundations. This episode covers metrics and paging as a product habit, learning from customer escalations, scoping small when AI speeds up coding, and building cross-functional relationships (support, sales, finance) as part of engineering judgment.

You'll hear practical parallels with episodes on delighters and onboarding tension, plus why reviewing agent-written code still matters for system intuition when things break at 2 a.m.

• Try hard and care a lot; more practically, focus on foundations and primitives.
• Put good feedback systems in place so you know what's going on with your product and where it doesn't feel good-alerting and metrics, customer journey signals, or customer interviews.
• If you have a customer support team, sit with them and watch them triage cases for your product; get to know support-they're sitting on a gold mine of product signal-and empathize with them like you do with users.
• Kent's shorthand for the mindset Dillon agreed with: make pain painful-if your users are hurting, you should feel it too.

• Cloudflare - Developers
• Cloudflare Agents
• Dillon Mulroy - site
• Dillon Mulroy - GitHub

• Company: Cloudflare
• GitHub: @dmmulroy
• X: @dillon_mulroy

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• X: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• Youtube: Kent C. Dodds

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Wayne blends delivery and product leadership—his stories range from a flagship-adjacent launch that nobody used to the everyday discipline of listening to customers without waiting two weeks for a meeting. This episode connects feedback-loop thinking (familiar from CI) to product discovery, yes-and conversations when someone is married to a feature idea, and the difference between hygiene features, performance features, and delighters when teams ship faster than users can absorb.

You'll also hear grounded takes on when "move fast" breaks trust, how AI may reshape search-and-listing UIs, and a concrete reading list: The Mom Test and Crossing the Chasm.

• Talk to people, ask good questions, and listen—Wayne says that's the biggest hack that's worked in his career.
• Read The Mom Test: ask how people solved this problem in the past instead of whether they like your idea or would use it—you get far more useful insight (Wayne ties this to caring about the problem, not your solution).

• The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick)
• Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore)
• Thoughtworks
• Wayne Allan — LinkedIn

• Company: Thoughtworks
• 𝕏: @xWayfinder

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• 𝕏: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• Youtube: Kent C. Dodds

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Dax has spent years building tools developers actually use; on OpenCode he's thinking hard about product process while the space moves at breakneck speed. This episode is a practical look at product deterioration (not just code rot), bottom-up adoption for dev tools, and how coding agents change who decides what gets built—without replacing the need for taste, restraint, and clarity about what problem you're solving.

You'll hear concrete examples from OpenCode's terminal UI and onboarding, parallels to Kent's Epic Workshop app, and a grounded take on inference pricing, hype, and when "ship messy and fix later" does and doesn't hold up.

• Convince yourself that getting good at product really matters—Dax says there's a lot in the culture that tries to tell you it doesn't, and you need that commitment because the belief will be challenged.
• If you don't already believe it, figure out how to make yourself believe it matters (Kent's recap of the guest's action).

• OpenCode
• OpenCode docs
• Dax Raad (site)
• Kent C. Dodds — blog

• Company: OpenCode
• GitHub: @thdxr
• X: @thdxr

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• X: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• Youtube: Kent C. Dodds

Watch this episode on YouTube