Inside our engineering organisation: Collaboration, Innovation, and Remote Work

It’s been a while since we published our last blog post about our engineering organisation. We thought it was time to refresh it, and add some additional flavors on top of it.

Alan is an environment where innovation thrives, collaboration is key, and knowledge is constantly shared and expanded. Our engineering team is structured to support these beliefs, aiming to be the best version of itself.

Every engineer plays a pivotal role in shaping the products and services we deliver. Our engineers are not just code contributors; they are problem solvers, innovators, and guardians of the user experience. This approach to engineering roles ensures that we maintain a high bar for quality and innovation across all our projects.

Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash

Team size, level & distribution

Team size & our approach to hiring

As of now, the size of our engineering team is around 90 people. Looking ahead to 2024, our focus is not on massively increasing this number. Instead, we are committed to sustainable growth, carefully aligning our team’s expansion with the evolving needs of our business and products. This is how we’ve approached hiring since the beginning of Alan, and it has allowed us to ensure we have the right people to work on our most important problems, without the need for layoffs during the most challenging times.

Here are some numbers concerning the community:

• Around 70% of our engineering team is at level D or E, which represents the Senior Software Engineer role at a more traditional company.
• Around 60% of our team has been here for more than a year, 15% for more than 4 years.
• The gender ratio is 85% male, 15% female or Non-binary. This is always top of mind for us and is something that we’re trying to improve.
• Even though 55% of our engineering team is located in Paris, we currently have engineers all around Europe — in France, Spain and Belgium.

We are remote first

Expanding on the last bullet point above, I would like to quote Jean-Charles Samuelian, our CEO:

Each Alaner is free to live and work wherever he or she chooses, albeit within certain rules. We have offices or coworking spaces in different cities. So there are three options for everyone:

1. 100% remote: work entirely from a distance
2. Hybrid: opt for a configuration that alternates between working remotely and staying in an office or a co-working space
3. Presential: opt for the classic “every day at the office” approach

Working remotely isn’t always easy, especially for employees who are experimenting with it for the first time. It remains important to put in place times and initiatives that contribute to forging strong bonds between team members, so that everyone has the best possible conditions to succeed. At Alan, we try to encourage people to meet every 2 to 3 months, through initiatives such as company offsites, community rituals, and product on-sites events at our Paris HQ (eg. hackathons).

Evolving our org structure

Introducing Product Areas

Our product organisation hasn’t changed much since the original blog post. We are still organised into communities (a group of Alaners from the same discipline — eg. Engineering) and crews (a group of Alaners working towards a common goal). To scale effectively, we’ve added a new organisational layer called Product Areas.

• Product Areas are groups of people who seek to achieve a mission or solve a set of problems that remain materially constant over time. Every product area represents a “business vertical”. Collectively, areas cover all key business problems Alan wants to solve.
• A Product Area is a multidisciplinary department, which can hold one to several crews.
• We have designed Product Areas to be “large” enough so that we’re not introducing too many areas.

Product Areas start from the long-term view and ownership of the experience they want to bring into the world for members. They centralize knowledge on their problem area — what we know, what we’re learning — and are empowered to make opinionated decisions about their mandate.

Product Area organisation

In our last blogpost, we talked about the special role of a crew lead. To ensure the smooth operation and continuous growth of a product area, we have created some roles within the community, such as area leads and area core team members.

The area lead is the person accountable for the value created by their product area through defining a vision and strategy aligned with Alan’s objectives, engaging with various stakeholders, fostering high-performing teams, and ensuring operational excellence to meet quarterly commitments. To succeed in their role, the area lead works closely with the area core team.

The area core team is composed of people across different communities: Design, Engineering, Data, Operations, etc. On top of their individual contributor roles, they:

• Drive product strategy and vision and steer product strategy reviews
• Maintain the Product Area’s staffing plan for maximum impact and work with community leads to find the best fitting Alaners
• Escalate blockers not managed at the local level appropriately
• Raise people performance issues or exceptional performance
• Maintain collaboration and get the correct input from all key business partners (Marketing, Sales, etc.)

Communities may add but not remove responsibilities to accommodate unique contexts. For example, Engineering can ask the engineering core team member to manage the overall team size, tenure and experience or undertake more specific people responsibilities.

The role of the engineering community owners

As our engineering community has grown over the years, we also needed to evolve our organisational structure, without creating the role of traditional managers. To support this growth, we created the crew of Engineering Community Owners, who are composed of people with cross-skill competencies, to run and improve the engineering as a whole. They focus on cross-area projects and initiatives that have a wide-reaching impact. The team lead is our VP of Engineering. Concretely, this means:

• Each engineering owner is focused on delivering one cross-areas project.
• The crew acts as a first-team, has OKRs, and optimizes globally for Alan.
• The crew acts as an engineering escalation path for the product areas, when and if needed - for example, on performance or behavioural issues.
• The crew is accountable to the community, which means it will be reviewed by the community during our bi-yearly engineering satisfaction survey.

When we made this change, we also made sure to define what an engineering community owner is not. They are not

• A gatekeeper, nor a bottleneck of information — they empower the product areas to do their best work
• Always the most experienced engineer in a group of product areas
• In charge of designing technical solutions or having the last word on technical matters
• The technical point of contact for all roadmapping and framing discussions

We hire people, not roles

During the interview process, we are often asked by candidates what the role we are hiring for is. At Alan, we hire people not roles, which means it is really hard to give a definitive answer to this question.

One of the particularities of our onboarding process is that during your first month, you will join different crews to work with them for a few days. This is what we call the woodchuck program. The goal is to give visibility to any newcomer to the different types of teams & challenges they can face at Alan. At the end of the woodchuck program, newcomers are asked which team they want to join. We try to accommodate their wishes, as long as it aligns with our organizational and business needs.

While we believe that creating high-performing teams takes time, we also want to encourage people to move from within the organization. We believe it’s important to promote a growth mindset, enhance collaboration between product areas, and foster innovation. We’ll talk about this more in a future blog post - stay tuned.

In short, we are committed to fostering an environment where every engineer can thrive and make a significant impact on our products and services. Our organisation is like a living organism; it evolves as we continuously learn and grow. This approach, aligned with our culture and values, allows us to do things differently. We look forward to the exciting challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Want to work with us?

Check out our jobs page. We have a lot of interesting engineering challenges ahead of us to solve this year.