Xharmagne Carandang is a Product Engineer at Lorikeet. She’s spent her most of her career figuring out not just how to build products, but what’s worth building in the first place. Outside of work, you’ll find her dancing, upside down in an aerial class, or mentoring through She Codes and F Factor. We chatted with Xharmagne for our Ducks in a Row newsletter.
Introduce yourself!
I’m Xharmagne (rhymes with champagne, chow mein), a product engineer based in Sydney. I’ve been fascinated by computers since I was little, and my fave part about tech is the part where humans interact with it.
What do you do for work?
I’m a founding engineer at Lorikeet. We build tools that let companies create their own AI concierge so they can give their customers great experiences, at scale.
My role spans building the product end-to-end, from frontend to backend to SQL to AI prompts and occasional infra (infra not by choice), as well as figuring out and validating what we should even build. I have the pleasure of working with people across teams and roles, and with our users.
What do you do outside work?
I need to stay active otherwise I get restless: I love dancing (will try almost any style, but currently focusing on contemporary and hip hop) and being upside down (callisthenics, aerial arts).
I also enjoy distilling things I’ve learned and sharing those through conference and meetup talks, or through mentoring with She Codes and F Factor. I go to share what I’ve learned, but I always leave with more ideas and fresh energy from being surrounded by people from such a variety of backgrounds; people who genuinely care.
Any podcast you are currently listening to, or a book you are reading?
I’m currently bingeing Ursula Le Guin books, her sci-fi has me hooked. Just finished The Lathe of Heaven. Some of its themes really hit me: the danger of trying to control powers we don’t fully understand, the unintended consequences of trying to force the world into an ideal shape, no matter how good the intentions. Hits maybe a little too close to home these days.
What is your favourite tool or resource, and why?
As an engineer in an ai-native startup, my favourite tools are… Markers and post-its, pen and paper.
Especially now when it’s so easy to silo oneself and “collab” with AI to ship ship ship, it feels so good to sketch things out, to move post-its around and brainstorm with the team. I think a lot about human-AI collaboration, but I’m always on the lookout for human-human collaboration opportunities.
Also feels good to put pen to blank paper and take the time to think through what it is I really want to say. As a writing professor recently said: the friction is the point.
Most rewarding work moment?
I led the rebuild of an AI-powered app. This involved helping the team work closely with our users to figure out what to build and to continuously make sure we’re building what they need. A couple of rewarding moments there:
At weekly demos, my teammates were excited to share what they learned about our users and how what they’re building will help.
After a usability test session of an early prototype, a user told us “I dread going back to the old version of the app, this new version is too good”
When hiring, what skills or traits are you prioritising now that you’re in an AI-first startup?
Not much has changed in terms of the skills and traits themselves. We look for people who: can ship things, understand what they’re doing, plan and scope their work well, communicate and collaborate well, and have high agency.
However, the way we evaluate those has changed a little because we expect and encourage the use of AI during work trials. We give gnarlier tasks to complete than we’d have given before AI came along, and our evaluation includes how well they can explain at a high level what AI has done, how they prompt AI, at what level they step in to review, if/how/when they iterate on AI output versus blindly accepting.
When evaluating ability to plan and scope work, we especially look for people who can slice things from both a technical and a pragmatic, product perspective. AI can help you ship so quickly now, but if, after your 32 agents finish spinning, your user’s life isn’t better, even incrementally, what was the point of all those tokens?
What’s one thing you wish you’d known before becoming a founding engineer at an early-stage startup?
I suspected but didn’t realise how true it was going to be: that being a founding engineer at an early-stage startup means so much work to do but so much fun that I’d be at risk of working to exhaustion.
Luckily, my suspicions made me prepare for this. Before joining, I decided on my personal Leading Indicator for Burnout (LIB), and I kept an eye on that to know when I need to rebalance. This is what’s kept my drive sustainable through our startup’s rapid growth. (My LIB is missing 50% of my dance classes over 2 weeks)
What do you like most about being a founding engineer?
There’s a shared bold vision, and we have the freedom to find paths towards it. Our founders set the high-level vision, then trust and encourage us to talk to users and work together to figure out how to get there.
Your one-sentence work-related advice
At the end of the day, we’re building things for humans, so never lose sight of the people you build for and the people you build with.
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