Our team culture

Over the first few years of Product @ MakeSpace, our team has developed a set of practices, or inspirations, that we’ve refined with each member joining and that we can all consider to be the defining pillars of our “team culture”. They apply to all engineers, designers and product managers, but with various degrees of importance.

1. Start with “why?”

The first step of any of our projects is either to identify a way that the user experience can be more delightful, or to identify and fully understand a problem that our users are facing. Only then can we elect How we will realize a solution and What it will be. It allows us to avoid the unnecessary or unused features that often result from defining What we want to build before we know Why we need to add something new.

2. Collaborate

We work together as a team in review of metrics, design, solution architecture and code. We all feel the responsibility for failed projects as well as successful ones.

3. Contribute from day one

It is important to understand from day one how much of an impact each new member will have on the team, and this is why it is important they are able push code to production, share a finalized product design, and generally participate in every step of the process.

4. Measure ourselves

Our decisions and experiments are data-driven, and it is important that we continuously maintain Key Performance Indexes for all to review at any time.

5. Be honest with ourselves

We value the quality of a solution over the time invested in it. If a solution has become too complicated or irrelevant, we should start over, knowing that we can learn from the path we took to get there.

6. Move fast and make each mistake unique

We have short product cycles, allowing for frequent releases, but we continuously measure and reflect with retrospectives and postmortems — so that each issue ever only occurs once.

7. Love our craft

Whether it is computer science, software engineering, product design or methodologies, we keep learning and share what we’ve learned, internally, as open source, and as knowledge sharing articles.

Shameless plug: needless to say I wouldn’t be posting this publicly if we were not looking for more talented engineers to join our team, so if the list above resonate with you, feel free to contact me or read more about MakeSpace job openings on our website!