CB Insights Engineering: Expectations & What It Takes To Succeed — CB Insights Research
On the engineering team, we strive to work hard to deliver new and innovative solutions. We dig into what it takes to be successful.
At CB Insights, our team is one of the most important factors to our success.
And a core aspect of getting the right people on board and for our employees to thrive is to set clear and high expectations for ourselves and each other.
During interview rounds with candidates, we strive to identify the people who are passionate about technology and who care deeply about their own work, the team’s work, and the organization’s work.
CB Insights is the place to be for those who want to make an extra effort to do the best work of their career in collaboration with other passionate people holding a high bar for themselves and the team.
To give you a better view of what we look for, especially in regards to our engineering team, we highlight some important expectations below.
Set smart ambitious goals — meeting 80% is good, meeting 100% means they are not ambitious enough
We are a goal-driven organization, so we strive to set goals that describe “what” we want to achieve without prescribing the “how.”
Having clear goals allows us to move in the same direction as a team, while leaving out the “how” gives engineers the freedom to figure out how to go about meeting the goal.
We don’t want to set impossible goals, so “smart” and “ambitious” goals are possible to achieve, but not guaranteed. Also, if we are always meeting 100% of our goals, we are most likely not stretching ourselves and meeting our full potential.
A healthy team works hard to meet its goals, but also take appropriate risks, which means there is a chance of venturing into yellow and red territories once in a while.
Deliver working software often — software running in production is the ultimate measure of success; we want to shorten the feedback loop and deliver frequently
Everything we do in engineering is to make us better at delivering great software.
And we want to do it all the time.
It doesn’t matter how great we are at coding, design, automation, and other tasks if we are not able to deliver working software. However, it is very difficult to deliver working software all the time if we are not really good at coding, design, and automation, so a lot of our efforts go into doing these things exceptionally well.
Baking in short feedback loops into everything we do is key to enabling this progress. It is hard to know what to improve if you don’t measure it, and the faster you get the feedback, the easier it is to improve.
Be solution-oriented — bring up challenges and be willing to work on solutions; others will always be there to help to find solutions with you and make it happen
We strive to be a very open organization where anyone can surface challenges of all sorts at any time. But, just as important, we also require that you are willing to work on solutions to such challenges.
What doesn’t work at CB Insights is to point out the problems and expect others to solve it for you.
This doesn’t mean that you need to have a solution ready before bringing attention to a challenge, but it means that you need to be willing to work on coming up with a solution and implementing it, either individually or with a team.
Our team loves to work directly with passionate people to come up with solutions to help get these solutions out the door.
Be transparent — nothing is off-limits to bring up at anytime
Things should be portrayed to be what they are and there should never be a reason to suspect a hidden motive. Safety coupled with accountability is how we build a just culture.
Be collaborative — with individuals, your team, and other teams, always consider others motivations before coming to any conclusions (motivations are usually good)
One thing you will notice very quickly at CB Insights is the collaborative nature of our people. There is very little competition between people and teams (except, of course, during Hackday!).
Everyone takes pride in what the team and organization delivers, and at the end of the day, that is what matters.
One small but effective way of ensuring good collaboration is to always assume positive intent from others. Nobody comes to work thinking they will do a bad job or mess things up.
Assuming good motivations enables empathy and triggers a constructive and collaborative problem-solving approach. These are key traits of high performing teams.
Be present with your mind, focus; never hide, and arrive on time for meetings you have accepted
Like we said, we believe great people want to work with other great people. It creates a compounding effect and allows creativity to flourish. This also requires discipline, and we expect people to be engaged in their work and truly care about the results.
Being “present” doesn’t mean or imply that you are an extrovert; it just means that your mind is into what you are doing because you are passionate and interested in your work.
Dare to experiment with new approaches — worst-case scenario, if something doesn’t work, we learn and adapt
We have a continuous improvement mindset. What works great today, may not work well in 6 months, 1 year, or 3 years. So we want to have feedback loops to understand what needs to improve and always be ready to change and adapt.
This also means that nothing is permanent, and with that mindset, we remove the fear that otherwise prevents us from making changes. Worst case scenario it doesn’t work as intended, and in that case, we will just try something different and adapt again.
In either case, we have learned something valuable, which might have been a necessary step in order to get us to where we want to be.
Do your best, always learn and improve — the ones who learn, adapt, look forward, and persist will succeed in the end
At the end of the day, this is all we can ask. Give it your best shot. Never give up. Always be learning. And keep a high bar for yourself and your team!
Originally published at https://www.cbinsights.com.
