Maybern Innovation & Technology Culture

How does innovation show up in your company culture?

Innovation at Maybern shows up in the expectation that everyone, especially engineers, is deeply product-minded. We’re building a highly configurable accounting system that has to be fast, efficient and work across an entire industry, so good ideas don’t come from isolated technical decisions.

Engineers are expected to understand the ins and outs of accounting and how customers use the platform. That shared context leads to better system design, smarter abstractions and fewer one-off solutions. Innovation shows up in those everyday decisions — choosing scalable primitives over custom fixes and building flexibility into the platform in a disciplined way.

What’s one recent innovation that improved user or employee experience?

A recent innovation was MXL, an Excel-like DSL we built into the platform.

We saw early that supporting a wide range of accounting, performance and business calculations through bespoke implementations would slow us down and create long-term risk. The real challenge wasn’t the calculations themselves — it was how to safely expose configurability at scale.

MXL gives users expressive power where they need it, while preserving consistency, correctness and velocity on our side. It’s improved customer experience by reducing dependency on us for changes and improved employee experience by eliminating repetitive custom work.

How do you balance experimentation with stability?

We’re very deliberate about how we balance experimentation with stability. Because we’re building a system of record, stability and correctness are non-negotiable — the numbers always have to be right.

That constraint shapes how we experiment. We place heavy emphasis on automated testing and validation infrastructure, which gives us a high degree of confidence in the core of the platform. With those guardrails in place, teams can move quickly and experiment without putting correctness at risk.

In practice, that means we’re conservative about changes to the accounting engine itself, but much more flexible in how we iterate on configuration, user workflows and new product surfaces. The result is that we can ship quickly while still maintaining the reliability you’d expect from a system of record.

How does your team stay ahead of emerging technology trends while scaling fast?

We think about this on two levels. The first is how we work. The relationship between product, design and engineering is being reshaped by AI, and rather than just adopting new tools, which we of course are doing, we’re also forming opinions on harder questions: Where should a product manager or designer still be spending their time thinking deeply? What can they hand off to agents? That willingness to rethink the process, not just tooling, is what keeps us ahead.

The second is what we build. Staying ahead for us means putting the right primitives in place so the platform can absorb whatever comes next. Our calculation engine, MXL, is a good example: It’s a flexible, composable layer that lets us express complex fund accounting logic as building blocks rather than one-off implementations. We’re always asking: What set of primitives handles the broadest possible complexity for our users while also letting us implement and scale across hundreds of funds?

What recent product or feature are you most proud of — and what impact has it had?

We recently launched a Performance Book of Record for private funds: performance metrics powered by MXL, our calculation engine, alongside a new Report Builder that lets users evaluate and draw insights from that data. Together, they represent a meaningful shift in what Maybern is to our customers.

Our platform has been the trusted source for fund accounting calculations. We’re taking that a step further by giving fund managers the tools to draw insights from those calculations — internal rate of returns, multiples and limited partner-level returns — with the same precision and auditability they’re used to in Maybern. With Report Builder, they’re building visualizations, comparing across funds and pulling insights that used to require exporting to Excel and hours of manual work.

What I’m most proud of is the compounding effect. Performance metrics are built on MXL, the same engine that powers our core accounting, so they inherit all the rigor we’ve already invested in. And because Report Builder sits on top of both, every new calculation added becomes immediately available for analysis. Each new layer makes everything beneath it more valuable.

How do you create a culture where innovation and experimentation are encouraged daily?

Our culture is shifting as the cost of communicating ideas is being dramatically reduced. We’ve leaned heavily into rapid prototyping, not as a way to produce finished designs, but as a way to think out loud visually. We’re still writing product requirements documents, but we’re no longer waiting on a PRD to share a product idea. A working prototype or a visual walkthrough gets the conversation started faster.

Now that our product, design and engineering teams can communicate visually in addition to writing, experimentation becomes a daily habit. Someone can show you what they mean in an afternoon and get immediate feedback. When it’s easy and cheap to make your thinking tangible, people are taking more swings, and the work is feeling more creative.