What It’s Like to Work in Engineering at Grow Therapy
On Dennis Daniel’s team at Grow Therapy, engineering quality isn’t a “gate at the end of a sprint.”
Dennis, a senior director of engineering, said that instead, each engineering team operates as a cross-functional unit, which includes a dedicated product manager, designer and data analyst, all of whom engage in daily sync-ups and make decisions together.
“The result is a team that can move quickly because every function needed to ship well is already in the room,” Dennis said.
What Does Grow Therapy Do?
Grow Therapy’s platform helps independent therapists launch and grow in-network private practices, supporting credentialing, marketing, billing and more.
Dennis's division at Grow Therapy is called “Lives Covered,” which oversees the company’s partnerships with health plans, employers and clinical data, as well as billing and payments. The engineers within this division work closely with design, product and data to align on the roadmap and key business priorities.
What Is the Lives Covered Pillar at Grow Therapy?
The Lives Covered pillar oversees Grow Therapy’s partnerships with health plans, employers and clinical data, along with billing and payments. Engineers in this division work closely with product, design, data and operations to improve access to mental health care.
“The result is a roadmap that reflects both where the business needs to go and what the systems need to become to get us there sustainably,” Dennis said.
By staying in close communication with cross-functional partners, engineers in Dennis’s division have ample opportunities to share insights and learn from others, creating a “one team” culture where success is collective. This tight-knit teamwork, reinforced through Hack Week, bi-weekly sprint demos and Grow Therapy’s dedicated developer experience team, gives engineers structured ways to experiment with agentic AI, share what they learn and build solutions with meaningful impact.
Below, Dennis shares more about how engineers drive Grow Therapy’s product roadmap, collaborate cross-functionally and embrace the latest technological advancements.
Dennis Daniel’s Role and Engineering Scope at Grow Therapy
Describe your role and responsibilities. How long have you worked at Grow Therapy?
I’m the senior director of engineering for the “Lives Covered” pillar at Grow Therapy, where I’ve spent the last six months leading the team that enables people to access mental health care. The pillar has two main areas: partnerships, which covers how we work with health plans, employers and clinical data, and billing and payments, which handles the full lifecycle of insurance claims, eligibility verification and client and provider financial experiences. My role spans engineering strategy, team leadership, architecture direction and cross-functional collaboration with product, design, data and operations to deliver on the technical and business goals of both groups.
How Grow Therapy Engineers Drive the Company’s Product Roadmap and Technical Decisions
How did engineering help set the last roadmap?
Roadmap planning at Grow Therapy is a genuine joint exercise between engineering, design and product. Engineering brings its own set of priorities to the table each quarter, specifically the platform investments needed to make future product development faster and more reliable, as well as the technical debt that must be addressed to sustain our reliability, security and compliance goals. Product brings client and business priorities. Along with design’s goals, we all work together to align on what gets built, in what order and why. The result is a roadmap that reflects both where the business needs to go and what the systems need to become to get us there sustainably.
Where does innovation at Grow Therapy come from?
One strong example is the Unified Ops Console, which originated from an engineer-led “Hack Week” project and is currently in active development. We formalized the roadmap for updating our billing operations, blending multiple workflows into one seamless, unified structure. Hack Week is one of the primary ways we generate and validate new ideas. From previous years, we’ve seen as many as eight projects make it into production. The best innovations come from engineers who are close to the problems, and when those ideas make it to production, the people who benefit most are the providers and clients depending on the platform.
How Grow Therapy Approaches Tech-Stack Upgrades
Every architecture decision we make comes back to scalability: how we build for developers and how we build for systems. We ask, “Can we build this in a way that does not require the same change to be made ten times across our codebase? Can we make it configurable enough that the next partner or the next payer does not require six to eight weeks of bespoke engineering work?” We invest heavily in decoupling tightly coupled systems so that teams can move independently and safely. Developer velocity is treated as a first-class metric. When we decide to adopt a new pattern or tool, the question is always whether it makes the next feature easier to build and safer to ship, not just whether it solves today’s problem.
“When we decide to adopt a new pattern or tool, the question is always whether it makes the next feature easier to build and safer to ship, not just whether it solves today’s problem.”
The Practices That Define Grow Therapy’s Engineering Culture
A few practices stand out. We run bi-weekly sprint demos that span all of engineering, where any team can share what it shipped and learn what others are building. This keeps knowledge flowing across a growing organization and reinforces that we are building one platform together. We also have a dedicated Internal Foundations organization, whose sole mission is improving the developer experience and platform capabilities that all engineers rely on. This signals that investment in the craft of engineering is treated as a strategic priority, not an afterthought. Finally, we run a yearly hackathon across all of engineering and hold pillar-level offsites to deepen collaboration and trust within closer-knit groups.
What metric signals both product and cultural success?
There is no single number that captures this, and I think it would be a mistake to reduce it to one. On the cultural side, we use pulse surveys to measure how engineers feel about their work, their team, their tools and the direction of the organization. We are also adopting the DX platform to get a more continuous and structured signal on the developer experience. On the product side, we track the outcomes that matter to the business, like uncollected revenue rates, insurance eligibility accuracy and time to launch new partnerships. When the cultural signal is healthy and the product metrics are moving in the right direction, that tells me the team is both motivated and effective. When they diverge, that is the signal to pay attention to.
How Grow Therapy Engineers Collaborate Cross-Functionally
Each engineering team within the Lives Covered pillar operates as a stable cross-functional unit, with a dedicated product manager, a designer and a data analyst in sync-ups daily and making decisions together throughout execution. This structure means that quality is not a gate at the end of a sprint; it is a shared responsibility present from the moment work is scoped. The result is a team that can move quickly because every function needed to ship well is already in the room.
How Grow Therapy Invests in Agentic AI
Staying ahead of emerging technology is not something we treat as a side initiative; it is structured into how we organize engineering. We recently formed a dedicated developer experience team focused on improving how engineers work through autonomous coding agents. This team is building an internal platform that allows any engineer to invoke an autonomous agent to take on a well-defined, well-documented coding task and return a pull request ready for review. Rather than having engineers spend time on the mechanical parts of implementation, the agent handles the execution while the engineer focuses on the design, the review and the judgment calls that require human expertise. We are currently running this in a beta with a select group of engineers to refine the experience and gather data on where autonomous agents perform well and where they still need human guidance. The goal is broad adoption across engineering later this year.
How Does Grow Therapy Use Agentic AI?
Grow Therapy is building an internal platform that lets engineers invoke autonomous coding agents to complete well-defined coding tasks and return pull requests for review. The goal is to let engineers focus more on design, review and judgment while agents handle more mechanical implementation work.
What makes this initiative meaningful is not just the productivity gain; it represents a fundamental shift in how we think about developer leverage. We are not asking engineers to use AI as a faster autocomplete. We are building the infrastructure for engineers to operate as orchestrators of intelligent agents, which we believe is the next significant leap in engineering productivity at scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Grow Therapy do?
Grow Therapy operates a platform that helps independent therapists launch and grow in-network private practices. The platform provides comprehensive support for credentialing, marketing, billing and other administrative tasks.
How does Grow Therapy use agentic AI in engineering?
Grow Therapy uses agentic AI by building an internal platform that allows engineers to invoke autonomous coding agents for well-defined, well-documented coding tasks. The AI agent handles the mechanical execution of the code and returns a pull request ready for review. This frees up human engineers to act as "orchestrators," allowing them to focus their time on high-level design, code reviews and critical judgment calls rather than routine implementation.
How do engineering and product teams collaborate at Grow Therapy?
Engineering and product teams collaborate as a tight-knit, stable cross-functional unit through several distinct practices. For instance, roadmap planning is a joint exercise. Product brings client and business priorities, while engineering brings platform investment needs and technical debt solutions. Together with design, they co-create a sustainable plan.
Additionally, engineers, product managers, designers and data analysts engage in daily sync-ups and make decisions together during execution. This ensures quality is a shared responsibility from the start.
