5 Questions With Annie Shin

“5 Questions With” is our blog series where we interview senior leaders at Harvey about the things our customers and partners care about most.

In this edition, we chat with Annie Shin, Engineering Manager of the New Verticals team at Harvey. Prior to this, Annie was a founding engineer at a stealth startup and an engineering manager at Brex and Nova Credit.

I’m passionate about helping people work more efficiently, so I gravitate toward companies that share a mission of empowering people to do their best work. That’s what drew me to Harvey. We’re solving a real, meaningful problem, and it’s incredibly exciting to be building the future of AI software together.

One of the most rewarding parts of the job is seeing the direct impact of what we ship. When a feature we built gives someone back hours in their day–whether that time goes toward higher-value work or simply more moments with family–that’s when it really clicks why this work matters.

One thing that’s unique to Harvey is what we call our ALRs—applied legal researchers. These are former lawyers who are now embedded into product teams. My team has two that we work closely with. We can go to them when we’re building out a feature, or need a lawyer’s input on whether they would prefer this or that. They give us immediate and practical feedback, and what makes it even better is that our ALRs are all somehow very funny. I don’t know if they’re interviewed for that, but it just creates such a fun environment. No matter the challenges we face or how wild things get, it’s always easier and a lot more meaningful when we’re surrounded by great people.

We’re building toward a culture where customer obsession, full ownership, and a bias for action are the norm. We keep our egos low and our standards high—knowing that speed, humility, and urgency are what set us apart and earn our users’ trust.

We have a Slack channel for customer feedback. Customers graciously provide us meaningful feedback on several projects, offering insights that continue to shape our work. I’ve been really impressed that engineers read through the channel daily, flag messages, and share ideas or what they have in-flight that can address that need. Or they’ll just see a customer's need and work on it in their free time without anyone asking them to. That level of ownership is crucial to success here.

In terms of actually building the software, we leverage modern engineering practices. We try to ship early, gather feedback through early releases, and continually iterate. We typically run a beta release, before which table-stakes requirements are implemented and the product is something we’re proud to GA with.

From that point on, we iterate with customers. One of the incredible things about Harvey is how engaged our customers are; they’re constantly sharing ideas to help us improve not only their own experience, but also the experience of other lawyers. By the time we reach GA, we’ve validated both the product and its features, and we know it’s something that can truly make an impact.

While each engineering team is autonomous with their own roadmap, teams do work closely on some projects together and review each others’ PRs and engineering requirements documents. We’re actively knowledge sharing, unblocking each other, and helping teams build on existing work to accelerate the delivery of new features.

I’m impressed by how engineers go beyond the product requirements–adding thoughtful touches that customers might not have even known they needed. These moments of creativity and initiative bring real delight and impact to our users, and they’re a big part of what makes Harvey stand out to me.

We have 10 teams total. Each of our core product areas has a team. We have platform teams such as Infrastructure and Security. There’s a data team that works on integrating all the different knowledge sources that Harvey can pull from.

My team is called New Verticals. We’re one of the newest teams at Harvey, and we develop novel product offerings that will drive expansion into new markets. We collaborate heavily with our Product Manager and Applied Legal Researchers to understand what features are in demand. We’re also customers of other product teams, bringing Harvey’s AI capabilities into the tools our users rely on every day, such as Word and Outlook.

One area we’re focused on is the Word Add-In, which brings Harvey’s Assistant, Vault, and Workflows into Microsoft Word. Lawyers spend time reviewing, writing, and editing documents in Word, and having Harvey on the side to help them review or draft or summarize enables them to work more efficiently and productively.

Proactive. Engineers at Harvey are encouraged to take initiative. With our team still being relatively small, there’s a wide scope of ownership. You’re trusted to make decisions and run with them, embodying the Harvey value of decisiveness. Harvey empowers its people and gives them the autonomy to execute, which I really value.

We’re good at supporting each other. Whenever people post in our engineering help channel, people jump to help. I’m never afraid to ask another person for support. Just the other night, we needed to have a late-night call with an external partner in a different timezone, and I wasn’t sure who was going to be able to join from another team, but multiple people volunteered.

Our engineers have a strong sense of purpose. They’re motivated by making a meaningful impact. And that impact extends beyond building software.

When I first joined, Harvey was interviewing frontend engineers by asking them data structure and algorithm questions, which I felt was not the most useful place to focus. I raised my hand to revamp the frontend interview process and wrote a new set of questions, and we started testing them right away. I was so surprised by how quickly Harvey iterated and adapted. Our new approach helped us hire some very talented frontend engineers while creating a better interview experience for our candidates.

We are intentional about striking the right balance between autonomy and accountability. It’s an art. Depending on the season, the pendulum may swing toward shipping fast and often or toward refining the details to get things just right. Our leadership encourages us to slow down to speed up—a rare but powerful mindset in a hypergrowth startup. While there’s always pressure to move quickly, quality is table stakes.

As a manager, I’m always thinking about how to have a multiplicative impact on the company–not just an additive one. Yes, I can write code, but my real leverage comes from enabling others: helping people become more effective, more efficient, and ultimately more impactful in their roles.

Engineers open PRs their first day and ship projects within weeks. Our amazing intern on the New Verticals team was able to ship their first feature, which unblocked a customer, within their first week.

The People team at Harvey has done a great job organizing onboarding sessions that set people up for success. We also have an engineering-specific onboarding to help people hit the ground running, alongside helpful documentation. Harvey will send new hires pre-reads to get them up to speed on the legal world and the world of AI. That helps people gain the right context so they can make an impact from the start. We definitely believe in empowering people from day one.