Iterating from MVP to an Enterprise AI Product with 73,000 Users and Counting
Hsiang-Hao Yu describes how his small team developed ExaWizards’s enterprise AI product, and what kind of developers he wants to work with now.
Software Engineer Hsiang-Hao Yu is a tech lead for exaBase Generative AI, a product of Exa Enterprise AI which is a group company of ExaWizards. He and a small team of 2-3 other colleagues initially created the product together. “They were very skilled,” Hsiang-Hao explained, “so we worked things out really smoothly.” After three or six months of building the product together, they were assigned more teammates.
“When I joined this company,” Hsiang-Hao told us, “I didn’t join as a tech lead for the current product that I’m working on.” As soon as management decided to create the new product, though, Hsiang-Hao and his coworker were assigned to develop a minimum viable product (MVP).
^ Rapid production of MVPs is standard procedure at ExaWizards. Hsiang-Hao said, “When the situation isn’t clear, we make something that works minimally and see.”
“From the beginning,” he said, “our boss or the sales department already knows that maybe one or two customers are interested in this concept. So it’s like, ‘Can you build something that we can show them in two or three weeks?’” These MVPs don’t have to be “pretty,” according to Hsiang-Hao, but they do have to work. Then, if customers or clients display further interest, the company will invest more resources into the product.
This particular product Hsiang-Hao described as “ChatGPT, but for enterprise users.”
Enterprise users care that the data they store on this system cannot be used as training data or used for other purposes, and some customers want their data to stay in the country and not go to overseas servers. So we provide a secure environment for enterprise users to access generative AI tools.
“One of the features we have [is that] you can upload your internal documents and just ask questions about those. And you can do productivity work—for example, many customers told us that they ask the AI to teach them how to write Excel formulas.”
Now, Hsiang-Hao’s team continues to grow through recruitment, with multiple other teams also working on the product. Additionally, at the time of the interview (April 2025) there were over 73,000 end users.
“Yeah, we have a lot of users,” said Hsiang-Hao. “It’s actually quite rewarding to know that many people are using our product.”
It’s especially meaningful to Hsiang-Hao. After he graduated from university in Taiwan, he attended a job fair held by Japanese companies. Given Japan’s higher population, he hoped a Japanese company would offer more opportunities to work on large systems with many users.
At first, this goal led him to Yahoo! Japan Corporation (now LY Corporation). “But after working around two years for Yahoo! Japan, I felt that I wanted to have more time to actually write code and work on things where I know the big picture.”
If you [work at] a large corporation, you’re working on a small component or part of the whole process. It’s actually interesting, but I felt that it might be fun if I also have the experience of working in a smaller organization, and know more about the whole thing.
That urge to comprehend the bigger picture was what initially brought Hsiang-Hao to ExaWizards in 2021. What keeps him happy here is that “people are nice. The pressure is not that high, so you can explore things comfortably and deliver things comfortably for our team.”
The congenial work environment is no accident; it’s the result of deliberate, and engineer-led, policy-making. Hsiang-Hao is particularly opposed to unnecessary time constraints.
To deliver good-quality product, it’s not good to have those kinds of deadlines that are decided arbitrarily.
“So,” he went on, “we communicated with other departments to say, ‘We’ll try, but let’s not set strict deadlines. For example, if you want to have a press release, you can say “around the end of next month.” That would be nice.’”
Still, the pace of work remains brisk, which is something Hsiang-Hao appreciates, describing it as “the best part.”
We want to release [features] early, to collect feedback from the customers or from other people in the company. So we release very frequently. We have two releases every week.
Hsiang-Hao also enjoys the discretionary work system, which doesn’t dictate start or end times, and the hybrid work environment. His team usually comes to the office on Fridays for in-person meetings, but works from home the rest of the time. He noted that it was quite easy to take child care leave with the company, and that several employees had done so recently.
Another ExaWizards perk, to Hsiang-Hao’s mind, is the team’s diversity. “It’s really nice to be able to work with people from different countries and different cultural backgrounds . . . from Asia, from Europe, and from different parts of the US.” As a result, he and his coworkers mostly use English in the workplace.
Maybe 70 percent of the time I speak English or use English to communicate with others.
The exact language used aside, one of Hsiang-Hao’s current goals is to raise the amount and quality of intra-team communication. As team lead, he considers it critical to maintain regular contact with his junior colleagues.
I feel like it’s important to increase communication. Some people are very good at asking for help when they need it. And those kinds of people, they might do well in any place. But some people might be a little bit afraid of asking for help, or they don’t know [what to do] when they’re stuck somewhere. So it will be important to talk with them regularly. Like, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ and ‘Do you need any help?’
When asked what sort of developers he’d like to join his team, Hsiang-hao suggested “people who are curious about the world and like to implement things, and can turn their ideas into real working things.”
For example, when there’s a requirement coming in, we don’t just accept it. . . . We want to know what’s the idea behind it, and what they actually want to do, and can we deliver something that’s better?
“The product and the markets are moving fast,” said Hsiang-Hao. “It would be nice if we can have people who can make things flexible, make their code flexible. That’ll be very helpful.”
He also noted that, in general, ExaWizards tends to hire full-stack engineers. “It would be nice if a candidate can know both front-end and back-end development, but it’s okay to be better on one. . . . If you know a bit about the other side, the chances are that you can come up with something that works.” He added that it’s easy enough to reach out to other engineers in the company to discuss and refine solutions.
To succeed in Hsiang-Hao’s team, candidates must be committed to quality. “The engineers in our team, I think most feel they’re very skilled,” he said. “The sales team or the support team sometimes will come to us with feedback from customers, and they know that we have other things to do.”
So they tend to say, ‘Oh, if this is too difficult, then you don’t really have to do this. And if doing it right is too difficult, you can first come up with a simple, easy version and then we’ll be very thankful for that.’ But [my team] will be like, ‘I think that after three months, when the user actually starts using this, the small or easy solution won’t work. So let’s do it properly from the beginning.’
“And they feel like they got more than they expected,” said Hsiang-Hao, with some satisfaction.