About half of the team is co-located in Zurich with satellite workers in surrounding countries. We are mindful about the pros and cons this structure brings along.
We encourage employees to work with a high level of autonomy and self-direction. This is why we offer that you work from remote and you're not bound to a fixed work schedule.
We chat daily and try to meet in person at least once a month. In between we schedule purposeful meetings in order to stay in touch.
This is a place where creative minds from various disciplines come together and create amazing things. We aim for an environment that enables everyone to focus on the important things instead of having to worry about complex workflows and the next boring meeting. That's why we prefer asynchronous communication and avoid management practices that cause overhead. You communicate openly, share your knowlegde and help getting obstacles out of the way early.
We provide office space at Colab and are home office friendly. We work closely with our customers and sometimes get a place in their offices as well. You can use your yearly budget to build a setup you're comfortable with (see Perks).
To break out of our daily work routine, we go on a retreat 2-3 times a year. This is to experience new places, refresh our minds, get stuff done and of course team building. Participation is optional. You can spend your yearly budget on this (see Perks).
For permanent positions we offer the following benefits
- Remote and home office friendly
- At the Quarterly you get a chance to actively influence business decisions
- Optional coworking retreats 3 times a year
- 2k budget for your dev setup, conferences or retreats every year
- 4 weeks parental leave for dads
We don't believe in too many long-drawn-out meetings. Wo try to keep them to a minimum. Their main goal is to get everybody on the same page and inform about important things that affect the company or your work. If you cannot make it to one of the meetings, let the team know in advance so we don’t have to send off a trained searchparty. They don’t mess around and they will find you. ;)
Max 15 minutes. Video call with everyone on the team. If you cannot participate, tell the others the evening before. Everyone answers 3 questions:
- what did you work on yesterday?
- what are you planning to do today?
- is there anything that keeps me from doing what I planned (eg. blockers, outstanding feedback, open questions)
The goal is that everyone knows what the others are doing. Also we can address blockers early and help each other out. The call should not take too long and not bother anyone with stuff that's not important for him. If there is something to discuss, we split up in groups after the call.
Max 30 minutes. Private video call with your team lead. The goal is to have a close feedback loop that goes both ways. Even though it's a place for both parties to address topics, the main focus is on you. We try to touch the following topics:
- you (contentment, issues you face, personal goals, ...)
- mentoring (feedback, help to achieve goals, ...)
- business (transparency, update on recent developments, priorities for the next weeks, ...)
Max 30 minutes. Everyone prepares by filling out a form in advance and presents them to the team in a video call.
The goal is to get a feeling about how the team is doing and to share news (business related or private) with each other.
Max 30 minutes. Everyone prepares by filling out a form in advance and presents them to the team in a video call. After everyone presented, we follow up with:
- Questions
- Suggestions
- Writing down any actions derived
The goal is to continuously improve how we work together.
The quarterly meetings have a special place in our heart. They exist to update everybody on the current state of business, the outlook and the companies longer term plans. Plus we will define goals for the upcoming quarter. We evaluate the goals from the passed quarter to get an idea on how we did and to find out if there is any need to introduce changes in our strategy. We also have time to discuss topics regarding the team and the way we work. You also have a say and can influence the companies longer term plans and how we achieve them.
We aim to be a product team. We’re chasing a long-term product vision, shipping one feature, squashing one bug after another. However, our work is not only driven by internal roadmap, but also by our customers immediate needs. Optimally we plan in a way that customer and internal requirements overlap. The number of customer tasks in the sprints depends on the customer budgets.
Our roadmap is the plan for what we will build. It has three timeframes.
We have a pretty clear picture of the goals of the 2-3 upcoming sprints. The short term roadmap is done based on feedback from the last sprint, our internal plans and pain points plus of course our customers roadmaps. We make promises to customers which are binding. This is represented by detailed tasks on our planning board.
For the next quarter, we have a rough sense what work is coming our way. It's a set of high-level goals, aligned with our customers roadmaps. It is visualized on the Trello roadmap board.
The team influences the roadmap by talking directly to the steering committee during the quarter. A “final” version is presented to the team at the quarterly. We always plan with the current team and don't rely on growth to plan the next quarter.
Everything beyond a quarter out is speculative, loose ideas that align with our vision and with our customers longer-term roadmaps. This is represented on the Trello roadmap board. The long term roadmap shows if we have to scale the team.