The Monsterstory — bringing paper to life
The words ‘I need to tame my diabetes monster’ (minus the profanities) coming from the very mouth of mySugr co-founder Fredrik Debong have formed one of the fundamental aspects of mySugr company culture — the monsters. The initial mySugr logo was created by designer Oliver Falkner and has become the face of both the company and the app.
But what is this “monster” thing about?
For each person with diabetes, the diabetes monster can be different. Scott once described it like a new puppy. If you pay no attention to it, your puppy will chew up your slippers, shit all over your living room, and basically be a source of chaotic interruptions in your life. But if you devote some time and energy to your puppy, it’s possible to minimize the disruptions. Similarly, actively engaging with your diabetes is important.
On a higher level, it’s fun and shows the world we have a different approach to empowering people with diabetes, it allows people to externalize diabetes if that’s helpful or therapeutic for them, and it’s helped us build an incredible company culture.
Company culture
When it comes to our company culture, we take a slightly different angle. Every person working at mySugr gets a personalized mySugr monster. Over the years, we’ve grown an amazing team of monster tamers, each tamer with amazing skills and talent, all working together to make diabetes suck less.
One of my favorite things about mySugr is that from the very start it has been about solving everyday problems for people like Fredrik and Frank, two of the four co-founders who live with diabetes.
A third of the people at mySugr live with diabetes. That gives us deep diabetes knowledge in every area of the company; leadership, management, product ownership, development, testing, quality control, marketing, support, and everything in between.
Psychological safety
We don’t waste time or energy on stuff that doesn’t feel right, and everyone is encouraged to call bullshit and question decisions along the way. We push each other hard with open, honest feedback and frequent iterations. Together, and always in the spirit of doing the best work possible, we make magic happen.
From paper…
Along the way, mySugr has taken these fun paper sketches and literally infused life into them! Now a team of over 70, each one with their own monster, and each one working tirelessly to make someone’s diabetes monster a smaller part of their life.
To see more of what our mySugr monster tamers have to say about our culture have a look here. If you love technical topics, our engineers also share cool stuff from time to time.
