A product culture for growth

Over that last 3 years at Experience, we grew from nothing to now supporting over 15,000 live events in 2015 with access to almost 200m fans.

We are successful because we focus on building the right type of culture. While a lot of emphasis below is common in companies today, our unique culture is worth sharing.

How we make decisions

Focus on a few strategic bets

“Overeating” kills small companies, while thoughtful focus facilitates growth. Our strategy dictates the daily priorities and goals of the team. We should all feel connected to those larger goals.

Data trumps opinions and settles debates

Arguing over opinions slows decision making. We do not waste time debating when a simple A/B test will lead to a quick answer that satisfies the team.

Be a fan

Better known as our version of “dogfooding.” We exist for live events and fans, and understand the importance of perspective. Therefore, we often attend live events and use our products. Using the product at a stadium or concert helps our team identify challenges and opportunities otherwise missed in an office.

Navigate tough turns with a well-balanced team

Balance between engineering, product management, and design fosters lean and impactful product development.

Mutual respect and understanding between inter-team divisions helps the team make great decisions. Each division brings its own prerogative; product management wants it fast, engineering wants it to scale, and design wants it to be perfect. A balance of these prerogatives makes our product great.

Measure what matters

We track goals and metrics to measure success and seek improvement. If it isn’t being measured, it isn’t important.

Kill products that don’t hit 30% adoption

This rule of thumb guides our team both before and after product development. We question how quickly a product can impact 30% of our partners (or fans) during the ideation phase and measure that traction closely after a product goes live. We are not afraid to kill a product that fails to meet its goals for adoption, and that fearlessness keeps our product family lean and effective.

How we win

Achieve better results through constant iteration

Our ability to push product to market quickly helps us learn and adapt. We aim for frequent and small wins rather than delay production until the product is “perfect.” This approach requires the team to monitor the product and always seek ways to improve.

Schedule well-timed projects

We focus our efforts to assign projects that take less than 2 weeks, and assignment depends both on the project itself as well as the assigned team members.

Most often, we strive to assign projects that our team completes in 2–3 days. “Brief” projects reduce risk, foster momentum, allow for flexibility, and create rapid value for the company.

Optimize for failure, not success

We test code in local, dev, and production environments; however, no matter how much we test, we will make mistakes and release bugs. In fact, we believe that with or without a formal QA department, the same number of bugs will sneak into production. Therefore, we focus on our ability to fix bugs and deploy within hours, not days or weeks.

How we act

One ego

We welcome every opinion on the team to support healthy debates. We built a team founded on trust and honesty; this creates the best forum for productive debate and decision-making. We communicate projects and debates “in public” — a fully transparent team.

Be aggressive

We are not afraid to make mistakes. We’re a team optimized for failure and learning. Our fan reach today will always be smaller than our fan reach of the future; figuring out what doesn’t work today creates leveraged learning for our future product.

Manage yourself

Our flat organization allows everyone on the team to seek out projects and finish them on time. We hold each other accountable for our work and understand that we exist to support each other rather than to delegate work.

We all have the freedom to tackle new projects that expand our skill sets. Everyone on the team is comfortable going from whiteboard, to design, to code, to test, to deployment. We have a team of experts that will help you learn these same skills.

Thanks to Rick Cabrera, Will Gisel, Erik Goranson, and Matt Feury for helping edit this essay.