Embrace Culture “The Showpad Way”

To start 2019 with a bang entire Showpad came together at New Orleans for yearly company event “Launchpad”. I still Cherish my favorite moment of the event, it was the Award ceremony. There were teams from across the globe and as Showpad is growing at warp speed there are chances you may or may not know the person who is getting an award but still everyone was cheering, applauding for all award winners.

Maybe that’s what the word culture means in any company. To celebrate and embrace each other`s achievements. Culture is an important aspect of enablement to reach goals. Every company has it, Showpad culture is unique, powerful and inspiring. We are maintaining it with meticulous attention to inspire everyone who touches it. The stronger the culture is, the fewer processes you need as you can trust the team members they will do the right thing.

If you have ever visited Showpad Ghent Office you probably would have noticed something: clapping. We have a small age-old bell placed nicely in the engineering arena whenever a team releases a feature small or big a team member rings the bell to applaud that small victory, that is followed by clapping from everyone and its funny people even take a few seconds pause to clap even if a meeting is going on. Mostly just know its for a release they don’t know details why they’re clapping, they just want to show support and have fun.

I’ve been here for about a year now. Here wanted to share some of the things Showpadders do to try and make engineering culture great.

We are Impactful everyday

One of our core values is “ Take ownership” you will notice this everywhere and in everyone: each one owns their own impact. Each team member is individually responsible for creating as much value for our users and for the company as possible.

Showpad hires not just for your technical skills also assess if you are a good cultural fit, do you always keep your problem solver cap on, If you have a sparkle in eyes when you talk about your work. When you have a team of Culturally bound, strong problem-solvers and passionate people the most efficient way to move the company forward is to leave the decision-making up to individuals. All the processes and work revolves around giving individual contributors accurate and timely information that they can use to make great decisions. This helps them in iterate, experiment, and learn faster.

Making this happen requires a few things like there should be flexibility to balance long and short term work, creating business impact while managing technical debt. They work to define and prioritize impactful work with the rest of their team.

Just as importantly, the team has transparent access to information. We default to information sharing. (“Be Transparent” One more Showpad core value) The more information engineers have, the more autonomously they can work. Everything is shared unless there’s an explicit reason not to (which is rare). We have various modes available in the organization for this purpose bi-weekly “Showpie” is one of them where CEO & Founders addresses the entire company with growth, future strategies, major happenings at the organization level.

We watch out for each other

This environment when you expected to create an impact each day and deliver with added value every time can be nerve-racking, especially for new engineers. No one is going to tell you exactly how to have an impact. That’s when one of our core values “ Grow Together” fits at the right place for rescue. We have a powerful 2 weeks engineering onboarding in a place (in parallel with general one) where New joiner will be assigned team buddy and guild buddy from your team to help in finding their way. Dedicated sessions with the team-specific product manager, product designer to understand how the team interacts with the product team . Sessions with all the relevant people to understand the context of their role and history of Showpad which immediately gives a sense of connection. With such support and guidance, New joiner is normally able to commit a piece of code in production in the first week itself ( which is a small assignment given by Guild buddy) is a great confidence booster for him/her self and the team in New Joiner. In our team, no one is ever too busy to help. Whether it’s a technical question or a strategic one, engineers always prioritize helping each other first.

We Measure It

Being able to decide what’s impactful is possible with a clear company strategy to guide the decision-making process. That’s why we’ve designed our strategy for simplicity (“Keep it Simple” one more Showpad core value) and quantifiability. It’s simple enough to fit on a single page and every employee at Showpad knows how their function relates to the big picture. Knowing the organization and your team’s goal helps you to decide how to use your time, which minimizes time-wasting debates. As each of our major goals has a numeric target, we can measure the effectiveness of various projects, learning quickly from our successes and failures.

We have different metrics in place to assess the impact and take the necessary actions for focus areas to name a few Product Metric- to measure adoption rate, People Metric — to keep an eye on attrition rate , Process Metric — to know lead time, WIP and Queues and Quality Metric — for overview on high severity issues reasons, mean time to recover and security issue reason , impact and recovery assessments.

Our team structure also maps to our company strategy: we work in Product lines which clearly defines the focus of the working group with efficient lines of communication. Teams are primarily comprised of Product Lead, Product Manager, Product Designer, Engineering lead, Team Lead, engineers and QA. There is a strong collaboration between functions. It’s common for engineers and product managers/ designers pair up and figure out how to make something work in real-time. The best ideas come from close collaboration.

We share and learn diligently

When you have a team of such great talent and individuals. It’s important to manage knowledge and pass on to others meticulously. That is channelized through “Guild”. Guilds are the foundation for the engineering team to make each member true software artisan and to discuss and include technical improvements to keep the Showpad platform newfangled with each release.

This gives a platform to different communities within the team segregated based upon various streams like Front-End, Lean, Eng-Ops, Data, Mobile, and Security. Guild members regularly to share knowledge, tools, code and best practices with each other. This keeps the flow of information and practices clean by disposing of out of date practices, tools, and technologies. and replacing them by state of art ones.

We Keep it Alive

We have achieved only a fraction of what we have planned for. There is still a lot more to achieve. Right now, we are establishing the customs, and practices that will carry us a long way forward. Things that seem like minor decisions today will be amplified multiple times down the road when we’re a much bigger team. That’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also fun to see experiments that work out and become part of the culture, or have something fail and get discarded right before your eyes.

When you’re growing quickly, it’s important to keep the environment creative and fun. Also not to lose focus on the goal while maintaining the same level of joy every day. Our engineering team meets quite frequently for “Wrap-ups” — where engineers demo the new functionalities they have been working upon; “Sharing & Learning Together Session” for Sharing knowledge which is useful for everyone; about Learnings from highest severity incident aka Pink Slips, new technology we learned, New Tools we implemented , Security Processes we should know, sharing the takeaways from an exciting conference; “Lighting Talks” where you talk about any topic under the sun which interests you. All these events give a chance to the team to connect, applause, appreciate and cheer for each other.

What makes Showpad special is that our culture connects engineers to the company mission and to each other more strongly. Engineers own their impact here, prioritize helping others and default to share information. Our culture empowers engineers to do their best work, also keeps the excitement alive every day.

If you want to be part of the clan of Good-Natured Ass-kickers. We are hiring!