Want a great tech culture? Build bridges, not walls

Azimo is first and foremost a technology company — it sits at the very heart of our company mission:

When we started out it was with a clear belief that the world was changing and financial services businesses weren’t keeping up. That modern software, built in a customer-centric way to be accessed on mobile must offer a faster, cheaper and much ‘better’ way to send money than the high street legacy companies like your local bank or Western Union.

But how do you make that a reality? As well as the make-up of the team (over two thirds of the business are involved in designing, building, testing our software or analysing the data it captures) we’ve come to learn the fundamental importance of having a good “tech culture”.

With it, you will build a team that cares deeply about your customers, solves the right problems and grows naturally with your company. Without it, you will build apathy and resentment among your talent, build the wrong things (slowly) and struggle to scale.

As Azimo has grown from a plucky startup into a company of more than 100 people that processes billions of dollars for its customers, we’ve learned tough but valuable lessons along the way. We’re sharing those lessons here because we know how hard it is to get tech culture right, and we want others to benefit from our experience.

So, just what does make for a great tech culture?

No “superstar” teams

If you’re blessed with a few individual geniuses, resist the temptation to team them up and give them the juiciest projects. In the short term you might see a boost of productivity. Maybe you’ll ship a feature faster than expected. In the medium/long term, however, it just isn’t worth it. Why?

1. Your best people should be mentoring and inspiring the talent around them, not locked away together in their own ecosystem. Spread the best talent around your business and watch the younger or less experienced team members flourish.
2. If one team is shipping all the important stuff, it generally gets the most resources and first dibs on the champagne come release day. If this keeps happening, you’ll build resentment from the rest of the business and undiscovered, un-nurtured talent will go elsewhere. Nobody learned to code just to fix bugs for a living.
3. Your product will become unbalanced. If you keep channeling talent into iOS engineering, for instance, don’t expect your Android product to keep up.

Recognise cultural differences. Work with them, not against them

Azimo’s has offices in both London and Krakow. Naturally this brings challenges, from common language to cultural and time zone differences. And while Tesla can send a car into space, stable video conferencing still seems beyond the reach of Earth’s brightest and best.

We learned early on that relationships can only develop so far through a screen, which is why all staff can visit London or Krakow as often as they need to. Visiting staff usually make a presentation about what they’re working on, or hold a Q&A about their area of expertise. Team drinks and dinners occur frequently. The subsequent friendships and understanding built between London and Krakow make working together a joy — even when Google Hangouts won’t play ball.

No factions

It’s easy to let your teams fall into silos such as mobile, front end, platform etc. as you divide your resources by expertise. As you grow, however, you risk ending up with teams that don’t communicate, disagree over who is responsible for a problem, or at worst are downright hostile to one another. Cross-functional ‘Mission teams’ go some way to solving the problem, but they only work if they’re set up properly, and preferably sitting in the same room.

Don’t forget that data should be as close to the development process as product, design and engineering. Don’t treat your data team as a query factory, fielding requests like a call centre. At Azimo we embed data specialists with our teams wherever possible and make them part of the process, from finding the problem to analysing the effect of the solution.

No hierarchies

Bring great teams together as equals to solve problems. Sure, the product manager is accountable for the product and somebody has to make decisions, but nobody gives orders and everyone should have a voice. Your best ideas will rarely come from senior management, they will happen all over your company if you create the right conditions.

At Azimo we hold open brainstorm sessions, we run regular design sprints and we listen to our customer service team’s ideas about how to solve the problems they hear about every day. Oh, and make sure you avoid the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) problem. Tough as its been for me to learn the CEO shouldn’t be telling designers what great usability is. As I’ve learnt the users do that. Sorry.

Everyone must know the customer

Nothing unites people better than a common goal. The goal of your product is to solve problems for your customers, so make sure that everyone knows who your customer is. Every team at Azimo gets the chance to meet and talk to our customers. We also share videos and summaries of usability labs across the company, and each team gets a chance to shadow a customer service agent for a day.

Given that Azimo supports remittances to more than 190 countries, our customer base is more diverse than most, which is all the more reason to speak to our customers as often as we possibly can.

Lots and lots of communication

An obvious one, but worth repeating as we’ve got this wrong in the past. Provide your team with all the tools and opportunities they need to communicate. Slack works well for us, but there is no substitute for time spent together.

We put budget aside for travel expenses, take the company to offsites in exciting places (we’re all looking forward to Berlin in June), get people together whenever and however you can. If you don’t have cash for the bigger things, put a few hundred bucks behind a local bar now and again and get people together for a night out. As well as being great fun, it will pay off in the long run.

Building great culture is hard, but it is the fuel that will power your business in good times and bad.

Towards financial services available to all

We’re working throughout the company to create faster, cheaper, and more available financial services all over the world, and here are some of the techniques that we’re utilizing. There’s still a long way ahead of us, and if you’d like to be part of that journey, check out our careers page.