Culture

Shipping & Talking to Customers Above Little Else

When people join Langfuse, they often ask: “What’s the strategy? What’s the 5-year plan?” We have a mission but no elaborate strategy, and that’s intentional. Things change all the time.

Shipping and Talking to Customers is our “strategy”.

We are extremely focused on shipping functionality—every week, over and over again. And it’s working. Hot take: We see many teams draft elaborate plans and “smart strategies.” The only thing that matters is shipping. Every discussion about something that is not about shipping or shipping faster is wasted time. Our focus often is on things we can fix today. This creates a constant forward momentum that compounds over time.

Everyone on the team must want to Talk to Customers. This is non-negotiable. We have the luxury to work with a huge community and some of the best teams in AI, staying close to them is key as they quite literally pull us into the right product direction. Everyone talks to multiple customers per day through various channels (GitHub, Slack, Email, Calls) and we put systems in place to make this efficient. This direct feedback loop is critical. When you ship something, you see the immediate impact and get feedback when something is extremely useful or introduces friction. This keeps us honest and focused on what matters.

In-Person Culture

We are an in-office culture. We have an office in Berlin and one in San Francisco. Most of our team and engineering specifically are based in Berlin.

The things we build are complex and are moving really fast. We are playing to win. In-person allows us to move fast and collaborate without a lot of process and meetings.

So you are in the office 5 days a week? Not exactly.

• We aim for 3-5 days in the office per week.

• Joining the office after lunch? No problem, if it gets you more productive

• 1 week remote per quarter? Easy!

Basically, we do care about everyone having a base in Berlin / SF and showing up every week.

Everyone is trusted to find a setup that gets them the most done.

High Trust / Extreme Autonomy

Everyone runs their part of the product/gtm end-to-end, including planning, design, implementation and support. We never implemented processes as we trust every team member to do the right thing (heavily inspired by No Rules Rules); whenever we felt like we needed more process, something else was actually broken and we fixed that.

In practice, this means:

• 80% of work is shipped by a single person without needing to collaborate. We expect people to decide for themselves what to work on given the overall mission, roadmap, and customer feedback.

• We don’t care when you start or end your day—we only care about intensity/shipping.

• We get out of your way. You have full autonomy to:

  • Decide what to work on
  • Spend money if you need to
  • Make technical decisions
  • Ship without asking for permission

End-to-End Ownership

Real autonomy means real accountability:

• You ship a bug → You fix it
• Your documentation is confusing → You fix it
• Your feature creates a support ticket → You help the customer and resolve the issue that led to the problem

No passing the buck, no “that’s not my job.” You own what you ship, completely.

Thereby, we move fast, learn from feedback, and can celebrate lots of wins.

Maker Schedule

We have only 2 scheduled meetings per week: 15 min planning on Monday, 60 min demo on Friday. We collaborate where it makes sense, but we get impatient with time not shipping.

In practice: Sometimes it’s silent in the office for a whole day if everyone is deep in the flow. This is not awkward—it’s productive. The Maker Schedule requires uninterrupted blocks of time, and we protect that religiously.

Usually when working on something new, collaborating with others makes the final product much better. During the design stages of a new thing, we usually do whiteboarding sessions with other members of the team to get their input and get the creative energy flowing.

Maker Communication

This is something a few new joiners or guests in our office have noticed: sometimes we pass entire days in the office without talking much.

We are in a great spot where there is just so much to do that often there is little need to talk about it. Lunch is our place for chit-chat and sync on what’s happening.

Also, we create very few documents that are not directly related to getting something shipped and if we do they are scrappy. No strategy decks, no theoretical discussions. If it doesn’t help ship something, we don’t spend time on it.

Agency & Taste

On the team we care deeply about agency and taste. It’s about knowing what good looks like, making swift prioritization decisions and shipping improvements without needing permission.

Taste applies not only to how we create things, but especially to:

• What to work on in the first place
• What quality level to ship at: High quality vs. good enough vs. if at all
• When to cut scope vs. when to go deep
• What’s worth the time vs. what’s a distraction

We all want to get impressive stuff shipped and have strong intuition about these tradeoffs.