Skillshare Engineering Team Highlights
Since joining Skillshare I’ve spent a lot of time talking with engineering candidates about our culture and how we work with product and other teams internally. We’ve always tried to have a very deliberate culture and follow clear and continuously improving processes. We strive to be inclusive and provide teams with autonomy to meet their goals. We’re proud of the culture and processes we’ve built so far, but we’re also always working on improving them. Here’s a deeper dive into some of the areas we’ve been most focused on.
Culture
Diversity & Inclusion
Skillshare has had a focus on culture and shared core values since the early days of the company. Starting early, rather than waiting until there’s a problem, has helped us maintain a supportive and inclusive environment. Our full-stack web team is 50% female. While that’s just one axis on which to measure diversity, it speaks to the culture we’ve built and are dedicated to maintaining. Culture is not about grabbing a drink after work (though we like to do that too sometimes). It’s about maintaining a positive collaborative environment and making sure everyone feels supported to improve our technology and features towards our shared mission.
Distributed
Our mission is “universal access to learning and opportunities;” we believe that should include the opportunity to work at Skillshare.
Though the majority of our team is based in our NYC office, we’ve made a concerted effort to become a more distributed company. Since April, our engineering team now has full-time members in 4 different countries around the world. We’ve begun working with contractors in additional countries as well.
We recognize that moving from a fully local team to a distributed one takes effort. As a company, we encourage everyone to work from home one day a week to help us all adapt our processes to better support a distributed culture. We still struggle with video conferencing (let us know if you have any tips!) but with the whole team onboard we do our best to make sure everyone feels included whether they’re physically in the office or not.
Learning & Fun
It should be no surprise that a company focused on education is filled with a team who wants to be continuously learning themselves. We do weekly Engineering “Skillshares” where each week a team member will volunteer to do a knowledge sharing presentation. We also do bi-weekly product demos to celebrate wins and share what we’ve worked on across the company. We have a book and education stipend, as well as a “fun fund” and quarterly team events.
How We Work
Quarterly OKRs
The entire company, including engineering, uses quarterly OKRs. These help us ensure we’re driving the most impact possible for the company with our decisions and actions. This also helps decentralize decision making. As long as we’re aligned on objectives, individual teams can be empowered to make the decisions needed to achieve those goals. Other teams across the company already know the “why” of what we’re working on because of these transparent OKRs.
Team Structure
Within Product & Engineering, we’re divided up into pods. Each pod has a Product Manager, a Designer, and multiple Engineers. These pods each have OKRs for the quarter that the team will collectively work to achieve. We’re continuing to work on giving more and more ownership to the pods to drive forward the features and improvements they believe will be most impactful towards those metrics. We’re proud of how well Product & Engineering work together here, and we get everyone involved as early as possible in the product development lifecycle so all voices can be heard.
Pods have daily standups and plan out their weekly sprints. They own the deadlines they’re committing to. In exchange, they are held accountable to the dates they give. This quarter in particular we’ve begun to focus in more on team ownership and accountability, along with an emphasis on shipping quality product. In the early days of a startup, you need to “move fast and break things.” Though we still want to move fast, we now balance that more with scalability and a high level of quality that delights our users. If we aren’t proud of what we’re shipping, we’ll hold the release until we are.
Technical Challenges
With this focus on quality, we’re also working on improving our code quality and the scalability and maintainability of our codebase. We’ve embarked on some aggressive codebase modernization projects. We’re upgrading both our backend and frontend frameworks that run skillshare.com, and we’ll also be doing the same on our Android and iOS apps. These projects are being done incrementally so that we can balance this work with shipping new features and fixing painful bugs. We’re excited to move these initiatives forward to improve the quality of our codebase, our efficiency in working with it, and its performance for our end users. We’re also excited to have our team members working with modern technologies and frameworks for their own career development.
What Else?
We’ve begun hosting tech talks at our office and intend to start sharing out more updates with the world on the technical projects we’re taking on. We all rely on the knowledge sharing of others to help us overcome technical challenges; we’re dedicated to giving back as well. We hope you’ll look forward to more in-depth technical articles from our team soon.
We’re hiring in our NYC office and beyond. Come join us!
