Doctolib’s Tech and Product Guiding Principles
There is no doubt that what attracts people to join Doctolib is its mission to improve the daily lives of care teams and to improve health for all. But for the mission to really resonate with people who work here, it also has to be consistent with the day-to-day values. Those values have to be clear and practiced every day. And given that we went through quite a growth spurt, the size of our Tech and Product (T&P) teams tripled in the last three years, mostly after the pandemic started and when face-to-face interaction was limited, we decided that it was the right time to reinforce our values and principles.
When starting the work on our T&P guiding principles, we had three goals in mind.
- Make them an extension of the Doctolib playbook. Our core company values Serve, Care, Act, and Learn had to be clearly recognizable.
- Help us in the next stage of our growth. Doctolib now has a suite of multiple products across France, Germany, and Italy and it’s still only the beginning.
- Have the same principles for Tech and Product. It is impossible for one function to succeed without the other and we have to operate the same way.
Over last summer, we had several workshops with diverse groups of team members to gather feedback. It was important to include people from different levels, such as managers and individual contributors, and from different job families, like engineering, product management, design, and others. It is tempting in such discussions to focus on what you want to change, but we also emphasized what we wanted to preserve to help us build on our successes.
In September, we met as a joint T&P leadership team at an offsite to review the results of the workshops and together refined the content. We were not always in total agreement, which is a plus when you have a team with diverse experiences and viewpoints. But in the end, we had something that we were proud of and ready to roll out to the organization.
We announced the principles that you see above to everyone at our monthly T&P All Hands in October. But to really make the guiding principles come alive, it’s not enough to share slides in a meeting or to put up posters on the wall. (Though it certainly doesn’t hurt and thanks to our amazing Design team we have the images above in our offices.) We next had to work on making them part of our day-to-day fabric.
Here is one concrete example of how we made the ‘Highest standards’ principle come to life. All teams have defined vitals with thresholds — healthcare pun intended — that tell them whether their product is operating as expected. If the team sees a vital go red, it immediately stops whatever it is working on to fix it. And we practice full transparency, with the most important vitals shared weekly to the entire organization.
We also updated a number of our People processes to put the guiding principles front and center. For example, every month I give a presentation to showcase them to new hires going through our T&P Camp. (We have a joint onboarding experience for everyone who joins T&P, with some tracks that are specific to each job family.) Importantly, I not only explain the principles, but also provide examples of specific decisions we recently made that were guided by them. We are now also in the process of updating our interview scorecards and job level definitions to incorporate examples of behaviors that are consistent with the guiding principles.
There is still a lot of work ahead of us, but we have already seen how our principles
- User centricity
- Impact
- Scale
- Team ownership
- Highest standards
- Mastery
serve as an important North Star for us that helps make our playbook more real and our mission more tangible. By consistently putting these principles into practice, we are well-positioned to continue to improve the lives of care team members and patients in France, Germany, Italy, and beyond.
The purpose of the article is to present and share the work done by Doctolib’s tech team. The information contained in this article is provided for information purpose only (on an “as is” basis with no guarantees of completeness or accuracy) and does not constitute any legal advice, nor has a legal value. Therefore, it could not contradict in any manner whatsoever with any legal binding terms applicable to your relation with Doctolib
