No Figma. No Jira. No docs. How Gusto built a new product line with Claude Code | Eddie Kim (CTO)

Eddie Kim shares his experience of building Gusto Cofounder with an extremely lean and unconventional approach. The team of five, consisting of engineers and a designer, built a fully functional product in just 10 weeks, without typical processes such as meetings, design docs, Jira, or traditional project management tools. They relied on a 'trash-can' method—creating quick PRs, reviewing, and deleting or refactoring them as necessary—enabled by low-code tools like Cloudflare Workers and Vercel AI SDK. This radical agility allowed them to prototype, iterate, and ship very rapidly, emphasizing the importance of small teams, speed, and the willingness to discard work that doesn’t meet needs.

To facilitate remote work, the team adopted an innovative 'perma-Zoom' approach: a continuous, always-on Zoom room where they maintained a virtual co-working space for real-time collaboration and rapid review. This setup replaced meetings, standups, retrospections, and Slack threads for the duration of the project. They shared a single whiteboard sketch and worked mostly in code, reviewing and deploying features continuously. This approach fostered intense focus and velocity, demonstrating how unorthodox workflows can significantly accelerate development in small, motivated teams.

Eddie highlights that their stack was surprisingly simple: Cloudflare Workers for executing the agent loop and Vercel AI SDK, with minimal other infrastructure. They built everything in-house, leveraging the low cost of rapid code iterations and reforming their architecture as needed. They adopted a model where code was written, reviewed, and then quickly discarded if deemed unnecessary, allowing them to experiment without fear of heavy rework or technical debt. This minimalistic architecture facilitated fast development cycles and tight feedback loops, crucial for such rapid deployment.

An inspiring highlight was how the designer, Katie, who initially had no formal engineering background, became a top contributor—shipping code and managing PRs at a high throughput percentile. She learned by pairing with engineers and received support from a small team, demonstrating how non-engineers can be empowered in a fast-moving, low-process environment. Eddie emphasizes that fostering a culture where designers and non-technical staff contribute code accelerates development and enhances product quality, especially when guided with a supportive mindset.

The team shipped features into production early, often through hidden or experimental pages, which allowed them to rapidly test and improve features in live environments. They used feature flags and in-place updates, updating UI and functionality iteratively while maintaining the core experience. This in-the-field testing approach enabled them to refine features continually, reducing time-to-market, and ensuring the product evolved in response to real user feedback, contrary to traditional, slower development cycles.

Eddie advocates for leaders to actively participate in coding and product development to understand their teams' challenges and to cultivate a supportive, flexible culture. He stresses that AI products can be built quickly with small, empowered teams using minimal processes and experimenting often. The conversation underscores that taking risks, giving teams permission to prototype quickly, and embracing a 'fail fast' mentality can lead to groundbreaking products with relatively low investment—changing the perception of what’s achievable in product innovation.