How These Hiring Companies Are Investing in Cutting-Edge Tech and Innovative Cultures

What does innovation really look like in 2026?

At Aceable, it looks like leaders who don’t just encourage AI, but model it, demonstrating its value to employees so that they’re empowered to spend more time on complex work rather than mundane tasks. 

That’s according to Peggy Black, a senior automation manager on the company’s marketing team. She and her peers are currently building an AI-powered marketing automation system designed to take promotional campaign execution from 50 hours down to two.

“We’re already seeing the cognitive load lifted from the teams,” Black said. “The repetitive work that used to eat up our team’s time is being replaced by systems that let them focus on strategy and creativity — the stuff they actually want to do.”

In addition to effective managers, the most innovative companies are ones with supportive engineering cultures. Just look at what Engineering Fellow Adam Gee and his teammates at data security company Rubrik have accomplished. With a team culture rooted in curiosity, fast experimentation and disciplined adoption, they’ve adopted AI in a way that will help customers operate with confidence and boost their teams’ productivity. 

To encourage everyday innovation, Rubrik gives teams ownership to try new approaches within clear guardrails, offering opportunities such as short pilot cycles, open demo hours and documenting proven patterns for others to reuse. 

“The result is a high‑trust culture where people can ship faster, learn together, and keep our standards high,” Gee said.

For technologists at Aceable, Rubrik and 11 other companies, including SailPoint, Arm and Chamberlain Group, a focus on staying ahead of trends and continuous experimentation unlocks new possibilities for impactful products — and fulfilling work. Read on to see how each company fosters innovation every day and how this has manifested in new solutions. 

Aceable’s mobile education platform offers online driving and real estate courses. 

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

At Aceable, innovation is baked into our company values — literally. Pursue growth. Exhibit grit. Get shit done. We’re encouraged to be curious, be innovative, and be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s not just a poster on the wall; it’s how we actually operate day in and day out.

For example, when we identified that our marketing team was spending more than 50 hours on a single promotional campaign, leadership leaned in. They rolled up their sleeves alongside the teams to break down walls and challenge how and why we do things. Our value of seeking to understand and listening to ideas, regardless of title, meant that everyone’s perspective mattered. Now, our engineering and marketing teams collaborate to turn automation concepts into production-ready systems. 

Our leadership isn’t just encouraging us to use AI; they’re modeling it, showing how these tools can free us to do more of what we love while the bots handle the mundane. That’s innovation living and breathing, rooted in who we’ve always been as a company.

 

“Our leadership isn’t just encouraging us to use AI; they’re modeling it, showing how these tools can free us to do more of what we love while the bots handle the mundane.”

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

AI unlocked something we couldn’t have done before. We’re building an AI-powered marketing automation system designed to take promotional campaign execution from 50 hours down to two. What currently requires nine teams coordinating manually across spreadsheets, design requests and Slack threads will soon flow through one integrated workflow, from brief generation to design tickets to multi-channel asset distribution.

We’re already seeing the cognitive load lifted from the teams. The repetitive work that used to eat up our team’s time is being replaced by systems that let them focus on strategy and creativity — the stuff they actually want to do. For our students, it means faster, more consistent campaigns reaching them when it matters.

We’re not waiting for perfect; we’re building the plane while flying it, and honestly? It’s kind of exhilarating.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

You have to get comfortable with “good enough for now.” We pilot everything in controlled environments, test with one campaign, document what breaks, learn, and then expand. We’d rather fail fast and learn than wait forever for the perfect solution.

Our AI philosophy: AI removes the friction between strategy and execution. We’re removing bottlenecks between ideas and impact. We start within existing team structures and tools, using AI to connect rather than replace. Meet people where they are first.

From there, we follow a good, better, best approach:

Good: Low lift, solve it now. Quick wins that build momentum and prove value.

Better: Medium lift, high impact. More planning, but the payoff justifies it.

Best: Longer lead time, highest impact. The big bets that fundamentally change how we operate.

This framework lets us experiment with intention and future-proof our work. We’re building flexible systems, not rigid solutions, so our infrastructure grows as AI grows. What takes heavy lift today becomes a quick win tomorrow. That’s how we stay ahead.

 

 

Rubrik (NYSE: RBRK), a security and AI operations Company, leads at the intersection of data protection, cyber resilience, and enterprise AI acceleration. Rubrik Security Cloud delivers complete cyber resilience by securing, monitoring and recovering data, identities and workloads across clouds. Rubrik Agent Cloud accelerates trusted AI agent deployments at scale by monitoring and auditing agentic actions, enforcing real-time guardrails, fine-tuning for accuracy and undoing agentic mistakes.

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

We stay current by testing what’s new with a clear purpose: Will it help customers operate with confidence and help us move faster? Alongside personal learning, such as podcasts, feeds and peer networks, we run lightweight, team‑led proof of concepts to separate signal from noise. When a tool proves its value, we document it, codify the pattern, and scale it across teams. That balance of curiosity, fast experimentation and disciplined adoption lets us keep velocity without compromising excellence or brand integrity.

 

“That balance of curiosity, fast experimentation and disciplined adoption lets us keep velocity without compromising excellence or brand integrity.”

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

Rubrik Agent Cloud. It started with our own AI adoption. We needed to move fast with agentic tech and still maintain governance, auditability and the ability to roll back to a known good state. We built for ourselves as customer zero, then turned those learnings into a product that helps teams accelerate AI safely and transparently. Internally, it’s already increased confidence and productivity; externally, it’s a clear signal of how we turn real problems into durable, scalable solutions.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

We make innovation part of the job, not a side project. Teams get ownership to try new approaches within clear guardrails, and we recognize both the wins and the learnings. Practically, that looks like short pilot cycles, open demo hours and documenting proven patterns so anyone can reuse them. We’ve also added “AI leverage and knowledge sharing” as a dimension in performance, rewarding curiosity, clarity and impact. The result is a high‑trust culture where people can ship faster, learn together, and keep our standards high.

 

 

SailPoint offers a suite of products designed to safeguard enterprise identities, improve IT efficiencies, reduce operational costs, and mitigate cyber risks.

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

Innovation is one of SailPoint’s core values, and it influences everything we do, from building industry-leading products to optimizing our internal processes. Our product and engineering team members are early adopters and tinkerers who bring creative new ideas to the table through internal lunch-n-learn sessions, blog posts, training videos and more, helping our teams continuously grow and improve. 

As we look to bring on new crew members, which we’re doing constantly as a high-growth team, we look for people who are equally inquisitive and have a strong desire to learn, experiment, and iterate. With each new team member bringing their own varied experiences to the table, we amplify our culture of innovation, diversify our skillsets, and continue to stay ahead.

 

“With each new team member bringing their own varied experiences to the table, we amplify our culture of innovation, diversify our skillsets, and continue to stay ahead.”

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

We’re tackling a massive engineering challenge: how to programmatically achieve security, governance and compliance at scale — fast. Our team has developed a streamlined, rapid application onboarding feature called Express Setup that allows our customers to get value from our products almost immediately.

The impact is huge: Our enormous library of out-of-the-box pre-built connectors combined with zero-touch application onboarding allows our customers to quickly and easily get visibility into more of their enterprise, which is key to reducing security risk. And because we are a SaaS platform, we are continuously iterating and shipping new capabilities to drive value faster. It’s exciting work, and there’s lots more ahead!

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

At SailPoint, our core values are not just plaques on a wall; we live them every day and, most importantly, hold each other accountable to do the same. Innovation has been central to our values and identity for over 20 years; it is one of — if not the — driving factor of our success. We foster it by encouraging our teams to take calculated risks and move fast. To push boundaries, you need the freedom to fail. That’s why we celebrate our successes and analyze our setbacks with fairness and transparency. This approach fosters the psychological safety that allows our teams to experiment, iterate, and ultimately drive impactful innovation and real, customer-centric results.

 

 

Arm’s Compute Subsystems are designed to help its silicon partners speed time to market, while focusing valuable design resources on building differentiated, market-customized solutions at scale.

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

We are lucky enough to have deep access to early technology across our sector.  When creating a new capability, we have a few key principles that we consistently communicate and live, from the top of this organization down.

We talk about “systems > process > people.” If you can create a new capability that is a digitally executable system, that is gold standard. If not, then can you build a repeatable process around it that is well-owned? Then, that is a silver standard. If not, then it will just have to be solved by hard work and emergent activities. The more you can systemize something, the more you can scale.

But systemization is not as simple as buying or implementing something; we are talking about solving deeply complex organizational needs, and the judgement, skills, domain-specific knowledge and drive that you need to climb up this staircase are critical. So, we also talk about “high judgement people.” It’s not the size of your team that matters; it’s the judgement and drive that you have that will scale your influence.

And, finally, we talk about “hiring more bots than people.” This is a logical consequence of the two principles above. If you are working to systemize, and the role that people play is judgement and direction, then this leads you clearly to the agentic future.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

My team works inside the company, working across all teams to: design how the company should operate; decide what goals the company should work to in support of its strategy and how progress is measured; prioritize company effort in support of these goals; maintain the company’s data and processes in service of excellent performance; and determine how to turn Arm into an AI-native enterprise.All of the work we do is designed to empower people across Arm to work in support of Arm’s goals, but the feature I am most proud of recently is some cutting-edge AI work regarding our licensing activities. As a company that has spent 35 years building an IP business at the heart of the semiconductor industry, the way we license our products is

as critical as the products themselves. So when we think about turning Arm into an AI-native enterprise, embedding AI into the business side of our operations is potentially as transformational as embedding AI into the product side of our operations. 

We are early on in this journey, but I am super proud specifically of work we started in 2025 to build a complete AI insights and actions system for our licensing team. Teaching an AI model about the intricacies of our business model and training it on the appropriate data has been a journey of discovery and invention, and already we are helping business teams save significant effort and come to new insights. In general, I am super excited by the opportunity ahead of building emerging AI capabilities deep into the fabric of how the company runs.

 

“Teaching an AI model about the intricacies of our business model and training it on the appropriate data has been a journey of discovery and invention, and already we are helping business teams save significant effort and come to new insights.”

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

The company has continuous improvement at the heart of its quality policy for as long as I can remember, and I have been working here for 30 years. It used to be on handcrafted tablets in meeting rooms; these days, we communicate it more digitally. Continuous improvement is as important to the culture as meeting customer expectations. The two go hand in hand.

There are many different tools we have used over the years and decades to encourage continuous improvement. We have had innovation days and hackathons, and we do loud spotlighting of successes — and of failures. The CEO memorably said at an annual sales conference, “Mistakes are OK.” This also needs to be rooted in psychological safety.

But I see where it really takes off is the flywheel of momentum that groups find once they have mastered this and start to turn their years of building and experimentation into a machine. The outputs of such groups show what great looks like and inspires others.

 

 

An “intelligent access” company, Chamberlain Group makes it easier and more secure to get into homes, buildings and garages by using intelligent technology.

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

In connected home technology, there is no shortage of “next big things,” so a big part of staying ahead is separating lasting shifts from short-term hype. Our teams spend time tracking developments across AI, computer vision and connected devices, but we’re disciplined about asking a simple question: Does this meaningfully improve the customer’s experience in their home? 

 

“Our teams spend time tracking developments across AI, computer vision and connected devices, but we’re disciplined about asking a simple question: Does this meaningfully improve the customer’s experience in their home?”

 

Technologies that clearly reduce friction, improve awareness, or increase security get prioritized quickly. Those that are interesting but don’t yet deliver practical value at scale stay in exploration. Because we operate at the intersection of hardware, software and services, we also bring engineering, product and customer insights together early so we can evaluate trends through a real-world lens. That focus helps us adopt the technologies that truly matter while avoiding distractions from momentary hype cycles.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

Two areas we’re especially excited about are meaningful notifications and Face Access. With meaningful notifications, we’re using generative AI to transform camera alerts from simple motion pings into clear descriptions of what’s actually happening; for example, identifying that people are hanging out in your driveway or that someone delivered a food order. At the same time, we’re reducing notification overload. Our recent improvements have decreased nuisance alerts by up to 83 percent, helping homeowners focus on the moments that actually matter.

The second area is Face Access. On our newest product, the myQ Secure View 3-in-1 Smart Lock, Face Access allows homeowners to unlock their door simply by looking at the lock, creating a hands-free entry experience that is both convenient and secure. Together, these innovations move the smart home beyond basic automation and toward contextual awareness and more intuitive ways of interacting with the home.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

Innovation becomes sustainable when it’s embedded in everyday work rather than treated as a separate initiative. We structure teams around clear problem areas and give them the autonomy to test ideas through experiments, prototypes and small feature launches. As we mature our experimentation practice, we’ve also introduced a key performance indicator around the number of experiments we aim to run each year to ensure teams are consistently testing and learning. Just as important, we create transparency around what we learn, whether an experiment succeeds or fails. 

Leaders reinforce that progress comes from iteration, not perfection, and we celebrate teams that uncover insights that shape future decisions. By combining clear ownership, measurable outcomes and psychological safety, teams are empowered to explore new ideas while staying focused on delivering real value to customers.

 

 

Apollo’s AI-powered sales platform is designed to help revenue teams find and engage leads, automate outreach, manage deals, and enrich data. 

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

It’s easy to be caught up on hype. The best method for us is to focus on the vertical use cases we want to empower with AI — e.g. find prospects or send an email — and pick the most efficient and high-quality implementation regardless of the new technology. For example, we ran blind testing across models for our AI messaging use case and found Claude Haiku 4.5 outperformed larger, more expensive models for our cold outbound email use case.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

Our AI Assistant. We rebuilt it from a 20-node system to a React-style agent architecture, analyzed 1,750 real user conversations to fix failures, and now have 40,000 weekly active users driving 2.3 times more meetings in their first 14 days. As one of our users, Delaney Beam, put it, “I’m no go-to-market engineer, but Apollo’s AI Assistant makes me look like one.”

 

Genius Sports is building technology and experiences “to make sports even better” across performance, officiating, fan engagement, advertising and sports betting.  

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

My team at Genius Sports sits at the heart of sports data, fan engagement and advertising, which gives us a unique vantage point. While technology cycles move fast, our partners need to build lasting connections with fans. We focus on the products and platforms that power brands, broadcasters, leagues and teams to connect with them at exactly the right moment. 

By aligning the team around these trends, experimentation becomes focused rather than random. New technologies are evaluated based on whether they accelerate those shifts or create measurable value for partners. That helps us innovate quickly without chasing every new tool or trend.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

The product I’m most proud of recently is the Moment Engine, because it changes how advertising works in live sports. Almost nowhere else do millions of fans react to the same play at the same time. Historically though, advertising hasn’t been built to respond to that, with media bought in advance and ads running regardless of what’s happening in the game. 

The Moment Engine translates live game events into real-time advertising signals using official sports data. Key moments like a red zone drive, buzzer-beater or comeback scenario can trigger signals that influence bidding, activate contextual deals, or power dynamic ad experiences. 

The impact has been twofold. First, it creates new premium inventory and moment-based deals that brands actually want to align with. Second, it connects the game, the fan and the advertising marketplace in real time. Ultimately, it moves sports advertising from static placements to moment-driven activation, allowing brands to show up when fan attention and emotion are at their peak.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

Innovation tends to happen when teams feel both ownership and safety to try things that might not work. We encourage this by making experimentation part of the daily workflow, rather than something reserved for special projects. 

 

“Innovation tends to happen when teams feel both ownership and safety to try things that might not work.”

 

First, we anchor teams around clear strategic problems instead of rigid feature roadmaps. When people understand the outcome we’re trying to drive, whether that’s improving fan engagement or unlocking new advertising value, they have room to explore different ways to solve it. 

Second, we encourage fast, lightweight experimentation. Not every idea needs a full product cycle. Prototypes, partner pilots and small tests allow us to learn quickly and scale what works. 

Third, we keep tight feedback loops with customers and partners. When engineers, product managers and commercial teams see how their work performs in the real market, it naturally drives curiosity and iteration. 

Finally, leadership reinforces that smart risks are valued. If teams know thoughtful experimentation won’t be punished when something fails, they’re far more likely to push boundaries and innovate consistently.

 

 

Onebrief’s software is designed to enable military forces to optimize planning and collaboration.

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

What’s most important is maintaining an ongoing investment in understanding what is rapidly changing across the technology landscape. Particularly with a mission as fundamental as Onebrief’s, there is a mandate to deeply understand new capabilities, separate bubbles from genuine change, and anticipate where technology can transform what we deliver to military command. That means staying closely engaged with emerging developments, especially in areas like AI, and continually evaluating how those capabilities might improve how complex operations are planned and coordinated.

Awareness alone is not enough. The real work comes from exploring how new technologies perform in practice. Our teams experiment with new approaches while staying closely connected to how the platform is used in real operational environments. Our customer relations team works alongside users every day and brings those insights back into how we evaluate and evolve the product. By grounding exploration in real problems and real users, we can scale our platform while continuing to incorporate technologies that meaningfully improve how military organizations plan and make decisions.

 

“Our teams experiment with new approaches while staying closely connected to how the platform is used in real operational environments.”

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

We are beginning to see what becomes possible when agentic AI and advanced simulation capabilities are applied to real military workflows. At Onebrief, AI Assist, together with our recent Battle Road acquisition, is an early example of that shift. AI Assist helps planners interpret, summarize, and reason through complex operational plans and military information so they can focus on the mission. 

Operational planning requires synthesizing large amounts of information, coordinating across many teams and constantly adapting plans as conditions change. AI Assist is an early step toward introducing intelligent systems that help planners navigate that complexity while keeping humans firmly in control of decisions. 

The addition of Battle Road expands that work by bringing expertise in simulation and real-time operational decision support. Their background in applying gaming technology to defense problems opens the door to new ways of wargaming and stress testing decisions before operations unfold. Most exciting has been how quickly this combination has expanded the conversation with our customers and inspired new development initiatives across our teams.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

Creating a culture of innovation starts with ensuring teams have the time and space to explore ideas and turn those explorations into genuine innovation for both our customers and our internal teams. That only works if experimentation is connected to real outcomes rather than treated as an abstract exercise. 

At Onebrief, our engineers, product teams and customer-facing teams work closely with experienced operational planners. That connection allows teams to see how new ideas affect our users’ day-to-day work and the way complex operations are planned and coordinated. Our mission to make military command superhuman is incredibly ambitious, and the closer teams are to real problems and real users, the more naturally innovation follows.

 

 

Regal’s AI agent platform is designed to help organizations transform their support, sales and operations teams with AI calls. 

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

At Regal, staying ahead of emerging technology while scaling quickly comes down to strong collaboration across teams. Our research and development organization is constantly evaluating advances in the market: not just what’s new, but what’s becoming practical to adopt in ways that meaningfully improve the product and create a real advantage for our customers. 

 

“Our research and development organization is constantly evaluating advances in the market: not just what’s new, but what’s becoming practical to adopt in ways that meaningfully improve the product and create a real advantage for our customers.” 

 

At the same time, our marketing team brings forward what they’re hearing from prospects, giving us an early signal into what customers are excited about, what they are starting to expect and where the conversation is heading. Our forward deployed engineering team also plays a critical role by surfacing customer requests and real-world use cases, helping us understand what’s possible, what will drive new customers and what will help existing customers continue to grow with Regal.

Because these teams work closely together and are constantly sharing feedback, both live and asynchronously, we’re able to move quickly while staying focused on what matters most: building innovative products, unlocking new revenue opportunities for our customers and helping them succeed at scale.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

One product I’m especially proud of is our Multi-State AI Agent Builder. It’s had a profound impact on our customers by enabling them to design more sophisticated AI agents that can handle longer, more complex conversations. It’s a great example of how we approach product development at Regal. 

The goal was to give both our internal teams and customers a structured way to build AI voice agents that could guide conversations through multiple states, depending on what a caller says or does. Our initial version focused on enabling multi-state voice agents and intentionally prioritized core functionality over polish so we could quickly unlock higher-complexity use cases for customers. 

From there, we iterated based on feedback. Over time, we introduced capabilities such as Global Actions, node-specific voice and large language model settings, keypad input controls, multi-state simulations and test cases, and draft agents. Each release expanded what customers could build and made it easier to support real-world use cases. The iterative approach of launching quickly, learning from customers and continuously improving is core to how we build at Regal and how we deliver meaningful impact for our customers.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

At Regal, “no” isn’t really in our vocabulary when it comes to exploring what’s possible. Whether it’s an idea from someone in the organization, a use case surfaced by sales or a customer problem that doesn’t yet have a clear solution, we encourage teams to investigate and prototype quickly. AI coding tools are accessible across the company, making it easier for people to understand how systems work, test ideas, and build early prototypes that can be refined with our R&D team before anything reaches customers. 

That process isn’t just about experimentation; it’s about raising the bar. When a prototype solves a clear problem, our product team thinks beyond the initial use case. It focuses on extensibility and design, so solutions developed for a few customers can ultimately benefit many. 

We also stay disciplined about measuring outcomes. In a fast-moving space like voice AI, there’s no shortage of impressive demos. By defining success up front and focusing on real results, we ensure that innovation at Regal is driven by customer impact rather than hype.

 

 

TrueML is a fintech company that builds machine-learning-driven solutions for credit recovery, debt collection and consumer financial health. 

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

Scaling at speed requires a bias toward action and a culture of continuous knowledge-sharing. We don’t just read about new tech; we build it! By fostering an environment where engineers are encouraged to experiment and learn from one another, we ensure that innovation isn’t a bottleneck, but an accelerator. We lean heavily on the strategic insights of our architecture team to guide our explorations. This blend of grassroots experimentation and architectural foresight allows us to pivot quickly and integrate cutting-edge trends without losing our momentum. We stay ahead by staying curious and never being afraid to try something new.

 

“By fostering an environment where engineers are encouraged to experiment and learn from one another, we ensure that innovation isn’t a bottleneck, but an accelerator.”

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

I am incredibly proud of the evolution of our data ecosystem. We’ve successfully implemented a sophisticated event-driven architecture and data bus that serves as the high-speed nervous system for our entire platform. What makes this truly special is the level of intentionality behind it. Our data lake was designed with rigorous security and privacy considerations from day one. This rock-solid foundation has unlocked new data science capabilities, allowing our team to launch ambitious projects. More than the code itself, I’m proud of the way our teams “teamed up.” Watching our engineers work seamlessly across disciplines to deliver such a complex, high-impact system has been the ultimate highlight.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

Innovation thrives on fresh perspectives, and we find ours through our incredible global diversity. By working daily with teammates across Mexico, Argentina and other global hubs, we’ve built a culture that naturally resists groupthink. It’s also great to learn about other cultures and be our best selves. I’ve had a fantastic time learning about the different holidays across our diverse culture. We encourage our engineers to bring their unique cultural and professional backgrounds to the table every single day. This constant influx of new ideas, combined with a safe environment for experimentation, ensures that we aren’t just following industry standards; we’re driving them. In our world, a diverse team is synonymous with an innovative team. Come join me on the team, and share your culture and ideas with us!

 

 

Jasper’s marketing solutions are designed to help marketers automate and accelerate processes, collaborate on projects and more. 

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

We build experimentation into the structure of how we work. I co-lead our front-end special interest group with Thibaut, a self-organized group of engineers who pick up problems they care about to keep the codebase in good shape. We don’t fix tech debt just once; our goal is to improve the underlying process so things stay healthy as we grow.

 

“We don’t fix tech debt just once; our goal is to improve the underlying process so things stay healthy as we grow.”

 

Knowledge-sharing is continuous rather than scheduled. We have dedicated Slack channels for AI topics, a learning and development budget that lets engineers trial new tooling directly, and “Demo Derbies” and hackathons where the bar is “Show something rough and real.”

What makes it work culturally is that our CEO, Timothy, has made integrating AI into how you work part of how you’re evaluated. You might expect this to create pressure, but it hasn’t, because the expectation comes with real support: dedicated time, tooling budget and a culture where sharing half-finished experiments is celebrated.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

One I’m really proud of is the end-to-end agentic development workflow we’ve built internally and rolled out over the past two weeks. As the engineering directly responsible individual for our design system, I personally felt the friction on both sides: designers waiting on engineer availability for design system changes, and my own engineering capacity being pulled away from product work. It was one of those problems that seemed solvable, so we went and solved it. 

Once a ticket is created in Linear, the whole loop just runs. The agent picks it up, opens a pull request, and notifies the right people to review, and if they request changes, it makes them automatically. No one is orchestrating any of it. 

What makes it meaningful is that non-engineers can now participate in that loop directly. Designers can ship design tweaks without waiting for someone to have capacity. In just the first week, the agent initiated work on 120 PRs across the whole product, and we’re only just getting started.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

The core principle we operate by is demos over meetings. If you have an idea, you build a rough version first and share it, not create a slide about it. In practice, this shows up every day. Someone drops a Loom of a half-baked idea in Slack, a PR gets shipped behind a flag before it’s “ready,” and a designer opens a ticket and just runs with it. Part of why people feel safe doing that is because we’ve invested in the foundations: quality code reviews, strong standards and patterns that hold up. That safety net is what makes moving fast feel sustainable rather than reckless. 

A lot of this flows directly from Timothy. In a recent company-wide message, he put it plainly: “Our biggest risk is no longer building the wrong thing — it’s timidity.” The question has shifted from, “Can we build this?” to “Is this worth building?” That reframe has genuinely changed how the team moves.

 

 

Identity Digital offers the world’s largest domain extension portfolio in an effort to help brands and people regain ownership of their digital identities. 

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

We sit at the foundational layer of the internet, which means we can’t choose between stability and speed. We have to deliver both.

A big part of how we do that is by treating our channel partners, the registrars who sell our domains, as a direct extension of our product team. They’re on the front lines with customers every day. When we pay close attention to their feedback, we get an early read on where the market is moving. The surge in demand for .ai domains from startups, or creators gravitating toward .studio and .live, showed up in those conversations before it showed up anywhere else. 

On the engineering side, we’ve built a decoupled architecture that gives us flexibility without overexposure to risk. Our core registry operations, including DNS resolution, run on infrastructure that is expected to be up 100 percent of the time. That’s non-negotiable. By separating that from our application and API layers, our teams can ship new features and iterate quickly without touching these mission-critical systems.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

The one that stands out most is our role in launching GlobalBlock, a brand protection service we built in close collaboration with GoDaddy and the Brand Safety Alliance. To understand why it matters, you have to know what brand protection on the internet looked like before it. If you were a company trying to keep bad actors from squatting on your name, your only real option was defensive registration: buying up hundreds of domain variations you’d never use, just to block others from getting them. It was expensive, exhausting and still left gaps.

GlobalBlock flips that completely. We brought together Identity Digital and more than 40 other global registries under the Brand Safety Alliance to create the first cross-registry blocking service of its kind. A trademark owner can now block their brand name across more than 700 top-level domains in a single transaction. The GlobalBlock+ tier goes further, catching look-alike variations and typos that bad actors commonly exploit for phishing and impersonation.

What I’m proudest of isn’t just the product itself; it’s what it represents. Identity Digital has long been a pioneer in domain blocking through our DPML service.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

We start by changing the question. It’s now “How do we manage domain registrations more efficiently?” but “How do we use AI to understand what a customer is actually trying to build?” That shift in framing changes what the team focuses on and ultimately what they ship.

From there, it comes down to two things: big swings and honest data. We give our product managers and engineers room to experiment with new technologies, including machine learning approaches that have no guarantee of working. But every experiment has to answer to the user. If we can’t show that something reduces friction for the person on the other end, it doesn’t matter how clever the engineering is.

 

“If we can’t show that something reduces friction for the person on the other end, it doesn’t matter how clever the engineering is.”

 

The last piece is making sure our internal breakthroughs don’t stop at our own walls. When we build something that works, we ask how it can work for the broader ecosystem, too. Making our tools available as turnkey APIs for registrar partners is a direct result of that thinking. It means the standards we hold ourselves to internally end up raising the bar for how domains get discovered and sold across the industry.

 

 

Digible offers digital marketing solutions for the multifamily housing industry. 

 

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

There’s no technology emerging faster right now than AI. We treat AI adoption as a company-wide operating model, not just an engineering initiative. Our cross-functional Digible AI Working Group brings together people from all departments across the company every month to share what’s working, evaluate tools, and solve real business problems together.

 

“Our cross-functional Digible AI Working Group brings together people from all departments across the company every month to share what’s working, evaluate tools, and solve real business problems together.”

 

We think about new technology adoption in three tiers: a stable baseline of tools everyone has access to, specialized tools for specific roles and a smaller group actively exploring what’s next and paving the road for the rest of the company. That structure gives us both speed and safety. People experiment in their domains while leadership provides the guardrails.

We invest in specialized AI training and hackathons to level up our skills quickly across the team, and we run weekly pulse surveys to understand how AI is actually changing people’s workflows not to measure activity, but to learn where it’s creating real value and where it isn’t.

 

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

I’m most proud of the work we’re doing on a ground-up reimagining of our flagship Fiona platform as an AI-powered marketing strategist built specifically for the multifamily housing industry.

With our reimagined platform, we’re moving from reactive data reporting and solid budget recommendations to proactive marketing intelligence driving context-aware recommendations and multifamily-specific results storytelling powered by responsible human-assured AI agents. We are making our customers look like geniuses, and that — empowering our customers — is something that gets me really excited.

 

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

It starts with explicit permission. We give people access to tools, training and budget for experimentation, and air cover to try things that might not work. We take a “yes, and” approach as much as possible.

Explicit permission is backed by showing, not telling, whether that’s through formal demos at all-hands meetings, ad-hoc collaborating to explore ideas and share findings with others in spaces like the Digible AI Working Group, or highlighting explorations and findings from anywhere in the team.

A great recent example: A member of our paid media team, not an engineer, independently engaged an AI-powered marketing approach built on Claude and Cursor, and started building it out for her workflow. Leadership’s job in that moment wasn’t to approve a plan; it was to get her set up with accounts, a safe sandbox and the right guardrails so she could keep going. That’s the model we want everywhere.