Building from the ground up
Craft Academy is a young and small company — we’ve only been around for 2 years. We sometimes refer to ourselves as “Sweden’s Smallest Educator” — with a team of 4 coaches and 2 marketing/sales/HR staff, we are certainly not big. Also, our cohorts run with as few as 12 students. We want to keep it this way for now so we can keep our focus at one of our core goals: “Do One Thing, And Be Best At It!”
Building a company takes time. And it should take time. Finding the right structure of our main service — a 12 week coding bootcamp, took some time. Hammering out all the bits and pieces in how to deliver the camp also had to mature. So did our marketing, sales and after-sales processes. The support we give our students was also defined, redefined and changed again after each cohort we’ve run. It’s still a Work In Progress and we will keep on introducing change across the board.
Over the summer we’ve initiated a process of defining a set of guidelines for our team. I’s as close to a set of “corporate values” we can and want to come. We initiated the process by performing a series of “mob-sessions” in the form of a retrospective where we discussed every part of the operation we run, from course development through marketing and sales to course delivery — and everything in between. As the next step we boiled down a lot out findings down to a set of bullet points that asked our team to go over. We processed everything again during a workshop and did our best to include everyones feedback and opinions. After some consolidation we came up with a document that we can treat as a Team Contract.
We would like to share the result of our work with you. Here’s what we came up with:
The Mission of Craft Academy is to create an empowering environment where people learn new skills, grow as professionals and collaborate on building exciting products.
Empowering environment
“- We Get Shit Done”
- We’re persistent and determined and we don’t give up.
- We drop our ego when we start working and we get shit done well.
- We don’t take success for granted and never settle — we know that together we can knock down any obstacle.
Learn
“- We’re open-minded”
- We are always striving to learn more, and listen without judgement.
- We create a fun, open-minded atmosphere, and encourage and support each other to grow as people and professionals.
- We welcome change and are not afraid to get out of our comfort zones to try new ways and practices.
Grow as professionals
“- We’re entrepreneurs”
- We are business-oriented professionals — creators, leaders & self-starters.
- We work hard to create value for our clients, our organization and ourselves.
- We take responsibility when we see something that needs to be done. We challenge conventions and we’re not afraid to fail.
- We are ambitious and aim for the stars, by always striving to learn better ways of getting shit done.
Collaborate
“- We’re real people”
- We care for and respect each other, as we know we can’t do any of this alone. We look out for one another and support a healthy balance between work and personal life.
- We are a team and we can count on each other in all situations. We’re in this together and take accountability for our own and the team’s actions. We’re not perfect, and we don’t pretend to be; but we see behind other people’s shortcomings and focus on the common goal.
- We communicate efficiently and directly, with honesty and transparency, and share our personal experiences for the benefit of the team.
- We value our diverse backgrounds, experiences and competencies and realize the exponential power in bringing different perspectives.
Build Exciting Products
“- We love what we do”
- We feel privileged to do what we love, we work hard to create value for our clients, our organization and ourselves.
- We take ownership of our work, and responsibility to follow through our work to the best of our abilities.
- We are dedicated to our brand, our mission and our values. We take pride in the results of our work, and in bringing Craft Academy forward.
- We are grateful for each other, our clients and for being part of an organization than makes a difference.
As the next step we need to find a good way for our current team to internalize this guidelines and make them work for us individually. For a distributed team like ours, that could be a bit of a challenge.
We also need to make sure that any new additions to the team are presented with these values during the on-boarding process, well before that… Well, we have our work cut out for us. But we’re of to a good start.
Again, it’s a Work In Progress. ;-)
Over and out!
Craft Academy is a Tech Education Provider that aims to bring new talent to the market and help to solve the shortage of tech workers. We are founded on the belief that modern development standards, agile methodologies and business skills are fundamental for ITC professionals. Our primary service is a 12-week coding bootcamp designed to provide individuals with a foundation of skills that allows them to enter the industry as junior developers.
With that foundation, our learners find employment in various industries or start their own businesses that bring new innovations to the market.
Would you like to know more about what we do? Follow us here on Medium, Facebook, Twitter or visit our website.
