Last Updated: March 27, 2023

<aside> ✏️ We know it can be difficult to get a good sense of life at a startup, so we made a list of the most common questions we get asked about working at Graphite:

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What is Graphite's mission?

Graphite builds consumer-quality tools for modern software engineering teams, so they can ship faster and create amazing products.

What is our long-term vision?

Graphite will start by owning “Task to Trunk”, and then expanding to “Task to Prod” and beyond

Here’s how Graphite fits into the software release process:

• Task to trunk (phase 1):
  • We start with bottom-up adoption of our opinionated code review & source control tools at fast-moving companies
  • Once we reach a critical mass within an org, we can provide top-down tooling that integrates tightly with the code review experience:
    • CI: annotate exactly where tests failed in the code, flakiness detection, on-calls for CI failures, stack-aware testing strategies/dependency detection (which tests need to run based on the changes)
    • Merge Queue: stack-aware, prioritization & grouping of changes to merge (talks to CI)
• Trunk to prod (phase 2):
  • Once we own task to trunk, we will expand into trunk to prod by offering opinionated deploy tools:
    • Integrations with final deploy targets (AWS/GCP)
    • Only deploy stable artifacts
    • Enable canary releases, rollbacks, and reverts (lives in code review)
• Post-prod:
  • Finally, we see an opportunity to expand even further and own post-prod developer tooling:
    • Integrate with feature flags on changes
    • Understand the impact of every code change on key metrics

We’ve seen at companies like Facebook how the tools at each step become significantly more powerful when they integrate tightly with each other - this is why we believe that the winner in the space will own the entire release cycle from Task → Prod.

How do we measure success?

We measure our success based on the value we create for our users, as shown by the ways they use Graphite in their day-to-day development cycles. While we of course seek to make money as a business, we strongly believe that revenue is a lagging indicator of this value, and you'll never see us use it as a top-level company goal.

What are our top priorities for the year?

1. Build the modern code review platform for fast-moving engineers & teams.
2. Unlock product-led growth.
3. Start to provide team & org-level value to marquee customers.