One of the three Wilco co-founders, Alon Carmel leads the Product efforts at the company. Also, he’s a lord. It says so in his Twitter bio, and those have to be 100% accurate.
What do you do at Wilco?
I’m responsible for making sure we deliver value to our users and have fun doing it. In other words, I’m the CPO — Chief Product Officer. Also, one character away from a Star Wars robot.
What does your day look like?
One of the things we’ve decided on very quickly is that we don’t want to have structured daily meetings at a specific time. Instead, everyone writes what they’re working on in a dedicated Slack channel. I make sure everything that needs to be done is being done, go over sprints, and work on our roadmap.
How do you stay on top of your tasks?
I keep an up-to-date ClickUp board with the things I’d like to finish.
What skills do you utilize to accomplish everything?
Product, design, development, writing bad code, taking care of toddlers, fixing motorcycles, being a lord, pro at wasting time on Twitter, giphy athlete.
What’s the best part about working at Wilco?
Somehow we managed to recruit and build an amazing culture of people who embody our “never stop developing” tagline and are driven by a mission of helping others accelerate their growth.
Speaking of Wilco, how did you first hear about it?
From talking to myself.
Ok, and now that we’ve established that maybe the founders should’ve gotten a different set of questions than everyone else, what was the best advice you’ve received during your career?
Be nice. You don’t have to be an asshole to get ahead.
What’s one tip or tech trick that no one knows that helps you a lot that you want to teach the community?
Use Jira whenever possible.
Tell us something about you no one would expect:
I once scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers.
You do know that “Married… With Children” ended its run 25 years ago, right?
Four touchdowns! Single game! Panthers!
