If you're not careful, success can make things worse.
You start with a simple idea. Secure networking should be easy. Right? We did that. But as we deliver more enterprise features, there's a risk of ending up right back where we started. Too many concepts, too many knobs, too many places to look when something breaks.
From the beginning, Tailscale has been about removing work. You install it, you sign in, and the machines you expect to talk to each other start talking. That’s it, that's the product. Everything else is implementation details.
It's gone even better than we expected. People use Tailscale in all sorts of places we didn't plan for on day one: across clouds, across teams, across services that now talk to each other without a human in the loop at all. These increasingly critical systems need to provide connectivity, but also clearly answer questions like who accessed what, why, and whether that access was allowed.
The hard part isn’t adding features. The hard part also isn't not adding features, if you have some self control. The hard part is meeting an increasingly diverse variety of needs, without losing the magic that people like about Tailscale in the first place.
That’s why I’m so happy Ross Kukulinski is joining Tailscale as vice president of product.
Controlling the sprawl of complexity
Ross has spent his career working on infrastructure and devex products that sit right on this fault line. Powerful systems can stay understandable, even as they grow more capable. He’s seen what happens when products respond to growth by piling on configuration, dashboards, and exceptions. He’s also seen the alternative, where teams make deliberate choices and control the sprawl of complexity.
Ross and I believe that great infrastructure feels simple only when someone worked very hard to make it that way. Magic is never accidental. It’s the result of engineering discipline, product restraint, good taste, and a team at the top of their game.
Ross is joining to help us shape what Tailscale's product lines become next, as we grow and evolve. We're going to keep it understandable, predictable, and boring in all the right ways. He’ll work closely with engineering to make sure we keep shipping impossible things that feel obvious once you use them, invisible once you get used to them, and terrifyingly nuanced once you understand them.
Tailscale magic isn’t really magic. It’s a whole integrated team making a long series of careful decisions every day so you don’t have to.
That’s what we’re trying to keep doing here, as networking problems keep getting bigger and the bot armies are on the horizon.
Welcome, Ross. We’re excited to have you here.
Avery Pennarun
