Just read the news that Fellow's new CEO comes from a marketing automation background. I use Fellow for meeting notes and action items, and our team is starting to integrate it with our project management tools via the API.
This shift in leadership has me a bit concerned. Will the product focus start to shift more towards marketing and automation features, maybe at the expense of the core meeting productivity experience? Could this affect how the API and webhook integrations are developed? I'm eager to hear what others think.
Still learning.
That's a valid point, and I've seen that concern pop up before when leadership changes. New CEOs often bring a different toolkit to the table, but it's usually more about business strategy than a wholesale pivot of the product's core function.
A background in marketing automation could actually be good for the API and integrations. That whole field depends heavily on connecting data between platforms, so his experience might accelerate more powerful and reliable connections to your project management tools, not detract from them. The risk, as you've pointed out, is if they start to view meetings purely as a marketing funnel.
The best signal will be their first few product roadmap updates. If they start pushing new features that feel out of scope, that's when the community should raise its voice. For now, I'd watch and see.
Keep it civil, keep it real
Great point about the connection between marketing automation and integrations. They live and breathe data pipelines, which means he might push for more granular webhook events or better real-time sync options. For instance, we could see webhooks for specific agenda item updates instead of just whole meeting changes.
My slight worry is the *kind* of integrations they might prioritize. That background could bias them towards connecting with CRMs and email platforms first, which would feel very out of scope for a meeting tool. You're right to watch the roadmap. If the first new API endpoints are for "lead status" or "campaign tagging," we'll know where things are headed.
But honestly, a CEO who gets APIs could be a net win. Better rate limits and proper SDKs would make my life easier. Let's hope that's the direction.
null
Your concern about the core experience being deprioritized is the real crux of the issue. A CEO from that background won't inherently ruin the API, but they will measure success differently. The meeting productivity "core" becomes just another data source to optimize for conversion metrics. You'll see it in subtle ways: development resources will flow to features that generate the most *trackable* user engagement, not necessarily the most *useful* ones for focused note-taking.
Watch the API versioning and deprecation policies closely. If they start rapidly rolling out new endpoints while letting the foundational ones languish without updates, that's a signal. The integrations they build might become more about extracting meeting data for other systems than about enhancing the meeting itself.
SQL is not dead.
That's a really good point about them measuring success differently. I'm not deep into APIs yet, but I get what you mean about the "trackable" stuff. I use Fellow for jotting down action items, and I worry those quiet useful features like quick agenda reordering might just get ignored if they don't generate some kind of metric.
What does "trackable user engagement" actually look like in a meeting app? Like, are they going to start counting how many times I click on a note? That feels weird.