It’s a Chimed Life: Meet Steve Mynett
Though Steve Mynett hadn’t heard of Chime when we first reached out to him for an opportunity to join our team as an Engineering Manager, “I became very quickly 100% interested in Chime,” he says.
And while Chime might not be a household name in Vancouver quite yet, Steve is one of a growing group of software developers who have brought their phenomenal talent to the very new, and now officially, Chime Vancouver team (to learn what we mean by ‘very new and now officially,’ head on over to our Hello, Vancouver post).
“I completely underestimated the mission, culture, and values of Chime,” says Steve. When he was interviewing, he asked us about how we put our values into practice by zooming in on an outage we experienced last fall: “I asked about how the team leadership responded when the engineering team faced challenging times,” Steve explains. “What emerged was that the top priority was psychological safety, blameless reflection, and supporting each other — that’s when I knew Chime was somewhere I wanted to work.”
Before joining Chime — before becoming a software developer, in fact — Steve was a musician. He studied classical music and performed for many years, including with Grammy Award winners like Don Rickles and the Temptations. Through his career in music, he gradually got into photography, which then got him into design, and when he wanted to understand how the products he was designing were built, he entered the world of software development. Steve has always been led by curiosity, which has greatly influenced his career path and life learning.
Drawn to the human side of his work
Once he entered the world of software development, Steve quickly became interested in how groups of people accomplish things. “Early in my career I was lucky to be exposed to leaders who created great teams, where I felt safe to experiment whether I failed or succeeded; how we worked as a team was as important as the products we shipped. This always stuck with me and made me think about the ways to empower and help everyone else understand our users and deliver great products.”
For Steve, it wasn’t just about building performant, functional, and impactful products, it was about the people behind them. He dived into understanding onboarding, hiring, tooling, and training, and soon after, he became a people manager. Not surprisingly, he loved it and has been a manager ever since.
“Early in my career I was lucky to be exposed to leaders who created great teams, where I felt safe to experiment whether I failed or succeeded; how we worked as a team was as important as the products we shipped. This always stuck with me and made me think about the ways to empower and help everyone else understand our users and deliver great products.”
Empowering others as a manager
Steve quickly found that he’s aligned with many of our company’s values and his role as a manager empowering others took shape.
“My goal as a manager is to make myself redundant,” Steve says. “I believe that self-organizing teams achieve great things and my role is to grow the skillsets of the team and individuals through coaching, sponsorship, delegation, and more.” For example, Steve fosters a culture that values and delivers feedback. He encourages his teams to give feedback kindly, accept it well, and find ways to act on it — in the spirit of constant improvement.
“I’d like to build a culture of feedback where individuals feel comfortable and safe giving each other feedback, and are curious and open enough to receive and process it — allowing a team to challenge themselves and support growth for everyone.”
For Steve and the growing engineering management team at Chime, empowering others is all about investing in the right efforts as the company grows. “We have a huge opportunity to figure out what the best ingredients for Chimers’ success are, taking all of our collective experience and distilling it down to what the right thing for our teams is,” he says.
In it for the long haul
In addition to alignment with our values, Steve was struck by — and fast adopted — our commitment to thinking about success in the long term. “We’re in it for the long haul in several ways: for our product (making one that lasts), our members (helping them achieve their financial goals over time), and Chimers (ensuring growth and success in their careers),” he says. As a manager, this means working with his teams on long-term career development, learning opportunities, sustainable timelines and expectations, and developing a culture of learning and leadership for everyone.
With a focus on the long haul comes the importance of scaling in order to achieve those long term goals. In fact, scaling isn’t just a priority for Steve, it’s a company-wide top-level OKR.
Scaling, like our commitment to the long haul, applies to many facets of Chime and means something different for each Chimer. For Steve, he thinks most about scaling our culture: “It’s not necessarily about preserving culture, it’s about how we nurture and grow it, figuring out the parts to change and the parts to preserve as Chime continues to grow.”
Part of the long haul is growing the team — and that means expanding their literal horizons
Another crucial part of scaling — and succeeding in the long haul — is growing our team. And alongside Chris Yammine, our first Vancouver hire, and the rest of our development team here, Steve is helping us access an entirely new talent market north of the border.
As of Sept 1st, 2020 we had a team of 15 developers and are looking to continue to grow, all of whom work across mission-critical projects. Steve sums up what it’s like being part of our Vancouver team: “I don’t think of myself working for Chime in Vancouver — I think of myself as working for Chime.”
The fact that our Vancouver Chimers work on projects regardless of location is an example of how we work together across the company and how we view our growth: We match developers to teams and roles regardless of where they are located. Often, as a satellite office, you don’t have the opportunity to do meaningful or impactful work. But since Chime has been really blown away with the quality of talent we’ve found in Vancouver across all experience levels of developers, our YVR devs work on a range of mission-critical Chime projects in a range of roles including Tech Leads and Senior Developers.
The team isn’t just fully integrated, they’re fully invested in the success of everyone around them. The way Steve sees it, “When you have really important work, you want great developers working on it, but it’s about more than just talented devs, it’s about people who make those around them better. By bringing experience, perspective, empathy, and curiosity to their teams, our team is committed to engaging with each other through mentorship and coaching in order to elevate the entire organization.”
Values-driven, in everything we do
For Steve, Chime’s values transcend offices, teams, and borders — and they permeate our developer culture, too: “As developers, yes, we care about things like latency and server response times, but first and foremost we care about our members’ experience (Be Member-Obsessed is one of our values).” Caring about our members is crucial to our success as a company, which means that in order to seize the market potential, Chime doesn’t just need developers who can code well, we also need developers with high levels of empathy and understanding to best serve our members.
This is even more important for our YVR developers because our product is only available to members in the United States. While this might seem like it wouldn’t be a positive thing — to work on a product you can’t use in your home country — it is for Steve because it encourages him, and all of our Chimers in Vancouver, to be more member-obsessed, empathetic, and mission-driven.
“While we’re building a product we can’t use on this side of the border, I find that it actually helps me stay even more grounded in our mission and values. After all, we’re helping a member base that has the potential to be as large as our country, and that’s a huge learning opportunity, regardless of where I live.” No matter where our members are we care deeply about them — and that stands true regardless of where Chimers are working, too.
This is why the opportunity to join Chime is so exciting to Steve and so many other engineers on our team: our values drive everything we do. Our upcoming growth will be full of interesting challenges — technical challenges, industry challenges, and scaling challenges — all of which will be approached from the starting point of our values.
And in keeping with our commitment to the long haul, Steve and his teams are taking a balanced approach, combining deadlines and urgency with taking care of ourselves. “The important thing for my teams to feel is that they have agency and autonomy to decide how they want to do their work in a way that is easily maintained and will withstand the test of time,” Steve explains. “This starts with a culture of sustainability, longer time frames, and managers who are aligned with our values, and ultimately will lead to Chime’s success.”
It’s a great time and opportunity to join a growing team that puts our mission above everything and values and supports each other as humans. We’re hiring in Vancouver, San Francisco, and Chicago. After all, we’re all Chimers, no matter where we are. See our open positions here.
