As our team came together, some recurrent behaviors, values and interests started to emerge. What was originally the shared direction and set of personal values of our members cemented into a very tangible company culture. While it may sound enterprise-speak, it is important as we grow that we better identify our culture and work hard on preserving it.
Vision & Mission
We envision a team of experts working on projects that have an impact. To make this a reality, both for our team and the teams we partner with, we believe in fostering a transparent, unassuming and meritocratic environment where people can freely experiment and organize to reach the best of our abilities.
We sometimes refer to our unofficial motto: “Build sh*t that matters”.
Values
Our values are:
Tell the Truth
You will never get in trouble for telling the truth. If you disagree with a decision, speak up.
- Share. Truth and good decisions need shared context. That’s why most things should be shared publicly, and virtually anything should be accessible to our team members. We overuse tools like GitHub, Google Docs or Slack because they make it easy to share everything we produce, including our discussions, with our team and the teams we work with.
- Be skeptical. Speaking up also means being able to question the way things are done. Most things we do or use could be improved, changed or dropped. Our tools and processes are the results of informed decisions, but they can still be challenged. Things often work until they don’t: teams grow, technologies evolve, behaviors adapt.
Care
Everybody on our team cares about what they’re working on.
- We’re passionate about our craft and what we work on. The projects we engage in tend to have a high impact, either in scale (e.g. building apps for millions of users with Starbucks) or purpose (e.g. designing the software running the Myanmar elections). We “build sh*t that matters.”
Know Why
You should know why you’re doing the things you do.
- Knowing why gives us a direction; doing helps us find out if we’re right. We prefer experimenting early and iterating upon our failures (and sometimes successes). This approach is far more efficient and fast than careful planning. When in doubt, frame the assumption you want to validate and design a way of validating it by doing. If somebody or something is a bottleneck, it is often better to not wait and go for it.
No Ego
Many of us have strong opinions, weakly held. Strong opinions are fine, strong egos aren’t.
- Play nice. Strong opinions don’t prevent us from treating each other well. Assume that the people you work with are well intentioned and capable. This is a prerequisite for people feeling comfortable experimenting, sharing and, more generally, collaborating. Just don’t be a jerk.
- Loosely coupled, tightly aligned. The same trust lets people and teams work independently while staying aligned. This concept somehow permeates all layers of our organization. Our software is built upon this principle (e.g. micro-services, single page apps), and so are our teams, methodologies, and tools. Spotify’s engineering culture is a great illustration of that concept.