The Importance of Clear Frameworks for Product vs Project with Jimmy Zelinskie

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jimmy Zelinskie, co-founder and CPO of Authzed, which is behind SpiceDB.

We kicked off the discussion with a really interesting discussion about whether or not SpiceDB is a database and whether or not Authzed is a database company. At first they didn’t see it that way, but as soon as they started leaning in on describing the product as a database, the more successful they were at getting people in their community to quickly understand what they did and how to use it. But it wasn’t just important for adoption: Once the team realized they were a database company, the business model they should follow seemed obvious, and they could make product decisions without stepping on anyone’s toes.

Some topics we covered:

• How positioning SpiceDB as a database, and Authzed as a database company, helped everything else fall into place, from growth to product strategy
• Why people often do want to avoid self-managing critical infrastructure
• The difference in ideal user profile and ideal customer profiles
• How transparency is the biggest benefit that Authzed gets from having an open source project.
• How the decision to release an open source project was a direct consequence of positioning the technology as a database.
• Why it is extremely important to have a decision-making framework for deciding what features will go into the open source or the proprietary features, that is communicated throughout the company
• Why open source companies need to consider the open source users and communities as one of their stakeholders that needs to be represented in strategic discussions

If you’re the founder of an open source company — or you know anyone who is — and you don’t have a good framework for making product decisions or struggle to communicate internally and externally what the difference between project and product is, I can help you figure that out. Here’s more information.