In October of 2025, we revamped the affirm.com marketing website in order to create design continuity between web and mobile apps and drive more conversion for the ~1M monthly viewers of the site.
And when we were finished, we had generated an additional $500K in GMV through a 3-day pre-Black Friday sale.
It was a lot of intense focus for engineers on my team and, frankly, one too many late nights to get this done. And what I told my team at the end of all of the scoping, collaboration, and execution alongside the immense work of product, design, and copy was:
“Engineers are important... and even if we are not seen for all of our efforts right now, you know what you accomplished.”
In 2026, engineering leadership is about perseverance. And simultaneously, it's about discovering how you lead under pressure.
In the wake of developers being told that their jobs are being taken away by AI, it's about reminding them to not lose focus.
Remind each other that engineering, and figuratively and literally, lead-generation, will forever be a human pursuit.