12/31/2024 Last edited: 3/7/2025

2024: Year in Review

Headshot portrait of Dustin Schau

Dustin Schau

Product & Engineering Leader

2024 was a good, but challenging year. As I noted in my 2023 “Year in Review”, 2024 was about being better. Well, was I?

Yes. I am most proud of continuing to grow as a dad, while maintaining (and trying new approaches!) of being a good partner to my wife, Maggie. With kids, the partnership with Maggie and I is ever more important. As a mentor of mine noted, without this foundation, the rest crumbles so while I am proud of the better foundation, there’s still more to do and this work is never, ever, ever done.

Professionally at Postman, the API client team shipped some novel improvements and some long-standing requests that continue to dramatically improve the user experience of one of the world’s most used and loved developer tools. But as I noted at a company offsite in 2024, our job’s not finished and we have a lot more to build.

Postman is an amazing company with great leadership, a great team, and a great product (and we’re hiring!). I am glad I joined, and while I’m proud of what I accomplished, I think 2024 was setting a foundation to build and take some more risks in 2025. We’ll see what sticks.

What I accomplished

  • Started a new job at Postman, and led the team to building (and completing) our two most requested open feature requests, including HTTP/2 and prompting for variables. More importantly, we’ve been focusing in on ease-of-use and the work on “easy variables” reduced time to send request by 50%, which represents a dramatic improvement to millions of developers every single day
  • Traveled to India twice! This was important to meet the team, establish a good foundation, and it was frankly fun to explore a diverse and interesting place I’ve never been before
  • Became an Andreesen Horowitz scout. This means I’ll be able to write small checks to builders building tools for developers, and help them build even better ones. If this sounds like you and you think I could be able to help, let’s chat
  • Gave a talk at A16Z about lessons learned building developer tools (slides). Not done learning!

What I learned

  • Metrics are guardrails, not a guide. I’ve long been a leader who cares about outcomes, and outcomes should ideally be measured. While this is important, one lesson I’ve internalized is that metrics are not a destination, they are guardrails that test strategy.

What am I hoping for in 2025?

In 2024, professionally I built a foundation for success at Postman. This includes hiring talented managers and engineers to help the team grow into a world-class engineering team, but it also was a year where I established my own conviction into what I want to build at Postman. I want to take some bets in 2025 and build on this foundation since that’s the main purpose of a foundation: to build on.

Personally, I think in some sense it also was a foundation building year. My partnership with my wife is at its best, but it also needs to be because we’re going to weather some challenges in 2025. Notably… the arrival of a baby girl in 2025. I am excited to be a girl dad to see our family grow even larger.

So, I say somewhat in jest, if 2024 was around being better and setting a good foundation, then 2025 is around survival and I damn well hope the foundation I laid on both fronts is solid!

But more seriously, I want to continue to grow as an engineering leader, as a partner, and now (or soon) as the dad of two amazing children. Specifically:

  • Date my wife. Establish a date night routine and most importantly, continue to build on the foundation of being a better, more thoughtful and more engaged partner.
  • Learn a new technology deeply. It’s clear that AI is here, and AI is here to stay. In 2023-2024, I dabbled in image generation (Midjourney) when I wrote the book Riley the Robot and found it transformative, and in 2025 I want to explore and go deeper on LLMs, how they work, and become more of an expert in AI. I learn by doing, so I’ll build something.
  • Be a good friend. I am lucky to have a great friend group both here in San Francisco, and in Omaha, and good friendships, like any relationships, require time, investment, and thoughtful communication. I want to spend more time with these friends, which will be doubly challenging with the arrival of a baby girl in 2025.

Finally, while it’s not a goal per se, raising Noah (my son) has taught me a lot of lessons about being a good dad. I am sure the baby girl will teach me even more, and I am eager, excited, and energized about all I will learn through and with her and the lessons I have yet to learn with Noah.

On to 2025.