UpKeep's Product and Engineering Journey with Ismail Elshareef

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We talked with Ismail Elshareef, UpKeep’s Head of Product and Engineering, to hear his story from being at big companies and working on products of massive scale, to bringing those experiences to build scalable consumer products and run big teams in the B2B SaaS world! We are excited for you to hear his journey!

One Year at UpKeep

A year ago, I joined UpKeep to help make the lives of the the underserved labor around the world better. Up to that point, I never really saw myself working at a B2B SaaS startup building maintenance and reliability software. Coming from Ticketmaster where I ran Consumer Products and Open Platform, this was a big change for me.

I took the job because I believed in the team, the mission, and the business. Also, taking on both Product and Engineering at a fast-growing B2B SaaS startup was an interesting challenge for me, both personally and professionally.

As I reflect on my journey at UpKeep over the past 12 months, the one word that keeps popping in my head is team.

"At UpKeep, our ability to build and nurture teams, both internally and externally, is unparalleled."

We call our external team community. If you’re affiliated with UpKeep in any way shape or form, you’re part of the team.

As a team, we’ve gone through so much together. From the expected trials of a rapidly growing business to the uncertainty of a global pandemic, we’ve gone through it all with incredible grace and aplomb. I’m so proud of the team and what we’ve accomplished together in such a short amount of time.

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Where We Were

On my first week at UpKeep, we had a business disruption in the form of an outage. The app was down and customers were calling. The night before, we had a product release–one of many that week. It was intense, but that week taught me the lay of the land and helped me identify areas of opportunity pretty quickly.

The Product and Engineering team at that time was comprised of small group of talented engineers who were working on many new features at the same time, pushing them out to production at lightning speed. Releases went out daily. Velocity was through the roof! The product and the business were growing at a pretty good clip.

This was great, but the quality of the user experience (i.e. ease of use, consistency, and reliability) suffered as a result. Quality might not matter as much to a burgeoning startup that is trying to figure out its product/market fit, but by the time I was hired, we were beyond that point and well into our hyper-growth phase.

It was very clear to me that the most important thing we needed right there and then was to stabilize the product. We didn’t need new features. We needed to ensure the features we already had worked well and to our customers’ expectations. I still tell my team:

"A feature customers don’t have is a feature they don’t miss. A feature they have that isn’t working right, is a feature driving them away."

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