Engineering life at Productboard: Personal benefits and professional growth
When it comes to an engineer’s life at Productboard, there’s a lot to cover. We’ve talked about the hiring process, and you got a detailed behind-the-scenes look at our onboarding process, workflow, and team dynamics.
In the final chapter of this series, I’d like to take you through all the benefits — the standard ones, the professional-growth ones, and the simply cool ones — that Productboard offers to its team.
The list is long, so let’s dive right in.
Self-development & benefits
The benefits offered by Productboard are wide-ranging, and I’ll try and touch on them all, but the ones that are dedicated to self-development and professional growth are at the top of my list.
I really like that Productboard places such a huge emphasis on education. Many things can fall under this category, and best of all, there is no limit placed on professional and self-development. Whether I want to buy a book or a ticket to a conference, I just have to request approval via Airbase, and my engineering manager will get a notification about it on Slack. Once my request is approved, I get a generated card to pay for it. The whole process is super simple. Nobody is bothered with excessive bureaucracy or hoops to jump through; it’s just a matter of a few clicks.
In addition to professional-growth-related perks, we also organize hackathons, podcasts, or internal and external meetings to discuss various IT-related themes within the company. We also take part in organizing, sponsoring, and visiting conferences or other engineering-related events.
When you join the company, everyone gets the basics: a Macbook (M1!), monitor, and accessories. You can be also assigned a company SIM card with 20 GB of data and unlimited calls and text messages. Of course, having home office or digital nomad life style is not a problem. From time to time, I like to take advantage of this by going to the forest and working from there, using the Internet through my phone. It’s a nice change of scenery.
Productboard also gives you a Multisport card, access to the Headspace application, five weeks of vacation, nine sick days, one day for volunteer work at a non-profit, and stock options. You can sign up for free English or Czech lessons with native speakers and join the company’s Toastmasters Club, where you can learn about public speaking and various soft skills. It’s ideal for improving your presentation skills because you get extremely valuable feedback on your speeches.
The office perks
During the Covid pandemic and the shift to remote work, Productboard handed out contributions to help its employees set up their home offices. The company also hosts seminars to help people with their mental health.
More and more people have started slowly coming back into the office this year. Our new Prague office in Palmovka is a sight to behold. The space offers an impressive selection of smaller and larger seating areas where you can relax if you need to concentrate or make a call.
In the Prague office, lunch is catered daily by White Circus, part of the Ambiente restaurant group. There are also several fridges stocked with drinks, fruits, vegetables, and other food. The selection is comparable to that of a smaller market. Occasionally, a chef from the catering company comes to the office and prepares things like artisanal hot dogs or bao buns to order. If you’re working from home or from some other remote spot, you’ll receive daily vouchers to order lunch from damejidlo.cz. In the office, we have coffee from Nordbeans (there’s always filter coffee or espresso available), tons of tea, books, board games, and so on.
My favorite area of the office is the climbing wall. It’s not huge, but much of it is on the ceiling, and it’s actually quite a challenge to climb it. Five minutes on it, and you’ll have worked up as much of a sweat as you would in half an hour of running, at least in my humble opinion. We routinely organize challenges there for speed climbing, blind climbing, and we’ve recently started a pull-up challenge. We’ve also had our own running and cycling groups. You can join a variety of other different clubs and initiatives, such as our “Friends of Smokey Whiskey” club, an Age of Empires 2 group, and a rock climbing club. Or you can create your own.
The office management team is amazing, and they take care of everything so that you don’t have to. During lockdowns, they organize various events. For example, we were invited to a virtual beer with a concert and on another occasion, we were virtually entertained by a party tricks magician as well as a card reader from gather.town.
Conclusion
I’ve learned a lot of new things about software development since joining Productboard. I’ve also met a bunch of interesting and experienced people, learned a lot about product management, and have finally found a company that tries to do things as well as it possibly can.
The fascinating potential of Productboard is reflected in honors like Startup of the Year 2019 (Forbes) as well as the impressive investments it’s landed. In the last Series C round, we got $72 million. Productboard, in various dev stack comparisons for building successful digital products (The World’s Best Digital Products), impressively ranks alongside such companies as Figma, Miro, and Hotjar.
Are you ready to be part of something exciting? Then get in touch. We’re hiring.
