Zach Dunn

I’m a product leader and repeat tech startup founder, based in Boston.

I co-founded Robin with my twin brother Sam, and spent nearly a decade there — first as CPO building the product, design, and customer organizations from the ground up, then spinning the customer organization out into its own division and running it as the company scaled.

Most recently I led product at Rally, an AI-native buyer enablement platform, where I was on the founding team and built much of its agent platform.

I build B2B products from zero to scale. I like being hands-on in the codebase and with customers at the same time. Lately that’s an obsession with AI as a multiplier for teams willing to move fast and aim high.

In the margins, I’m also reviving Either, the viral “would you rather” game from the 2010s that grew to a billion-plus answers.

• @zachdunn
• @zachdunn
• in/zachdunn
• /resume

Small, useful infrastructure I’m building in the open for agents.

Press

Featured in the NYT, WSJ, NPR, and CNBC on hybrid work and return-to-office. Selected coverage:

• NYT The Rules for Hybrid Work Were Always Made Up
• WSJ You’re Going Back to the Office. Here’s What Your Day Might Look Like
• NYT The End of a Return-to-Office Date
• NYT Dealbook D.C. Policy Forum 2022

Writing

Things I’ve written about building products and startups that still hold up:

• 10 lessons from a decade at Robin An excerpt from the farewell memo I sent to Robin, with ten lessons from a decade as co-founder.
• Why product expertise might be hurting your go-to-market team A memo I sent to Robin when we hit 200 people, on why deep feature knowledge can quietly make your GTM team worse.
• How to say no to feature requests without becoming the villain On the difference between a decision and a delay, and why customers can tell which one you’re giving them.
• Why product teams overestimate revenue from sales feedback Four ways “we lost a $100K deal” stories lead you astray.
• How to make (and present) a better customer roadmap How to find a sticky narrative when presenting your product roadmap to customers.
• How to set adoption goals for a new feature launch Three ways to pick a launch adoption goal you’ll actually believe: Day One Eligibility, benchmarks, and early adopters.
• Creative tension: why good conflict makes great teams Why low conflict is often manners, not alignment — and how good conflict powers high-performing startup teams.
• How to future sell your product (the right way) A three-part story arc for talking about where your product is headed without setting the wrong expectations.
• Don’t sweat details in product announcements Most of your audience reads launch updates weeks later, so write for clarity and shelf life instead of precision.
• How designing an invisible app almost killed us Lessons from building automation products that give useful feedback without getting in the way.
• In product development, you have to unbreak before you can invent Why early product development is often about earning the right to ship the ambitious parts.
• Lies, damned lies, and startup advice How founders can separate useful feedback from reasonable-sounding distractions.
• What’s hard today is temporary Why today’s technology costs shouldn’t disqualify ideas built for the future.