Smart Pension Engineering Culture
“What’s the Smart Pension Engineering culture like?”. This was the main question I asked Sam Barton when I was interviewing with Smart Pension in August 2018. We then had a rather enjoyable conversation about what the culture was at the time and where we wanted to take it. That conversation was the main reason I joined Smart Pension.
We’re both extremely people focused (LinkedIn stalk me, even the things I do in my spare time are about humans and human connection)— we firmly believe in creating an environment where everyone can thrive and to find passionate people who want to do what we do, creating a best-in-world engineering team that can fulfil our mission statement:
Our mission is to transform pensions, savings and financial well-being, across all generations, around the world.
Why does engineering culture matter? It’s what enables us to move fast and build a industry changing pensions platform with quality at the core of what we do — plus enjoy coming to work!
As part of our recent Virtual Engineering Offsite we took some time to take a look at how we see our current engineering culture. What is our culture? Why do we like working at Smart? What can we do to make things even better (Kaizen - continuously improve)?
Our approach was to use 3 different methods to try and get an unbiased view of where we are now:
- An anonymous survey
- An interview from the people team (also sometimes known as HR) with individual teams (to remove the bias from Agile Leads or Engineering Managers asking the questions)
- Feedback from individual 1–2–1’s with Engineering Managers.
This seemed to give us a 360 view, that people in the Engineering department agreed with.
Word Cloud
From the anonymous survey we asked people to enter 6 words that described the Smart Engineering culture. We generated a word cloud, with more frequently used words larger in size.
Smart Engineering Culture
We’re not perfect, nothing is ever perfect. Our goal with Kaizen is to constantly push forward every day and improve. The wonderful snowball effect, a small change or tweak every week ends up in a massive improvement over time.
- No Blame Culture — We have a no blame culture at Smart. When something goes wrong, we step back, take a look at what went wrong as a team and work out how to improve our process or code to make sure it never happens again. It allows for a high degree of transparency when we conduct a post mortem. At the same time, we attempt to never make the same mistake twice and people are accountable for their actions and making sure they follow our processes.
- Trust — Everyone seems to recognise that they are trusted. People are trusted to do their best work collaborating within their teams to get software delivered.
- Quality — We focus on quality. In some cases we are looking after individuals’ life savings. We take that very seriously. Pensions are a long term investment, building a pensions platform to transform savings around the world is also a long term investment. We take the time to build software correctly.
- Growth and Continuous Improvement- We are constantly taking a look at how to improve — Kaizen! As individuals, as a team, as a department and as an organisation. Cross department retros are frequent. Every person has a manager that they spend time with, at least fortnightly, to take a look at how they can continue to grow as individuals and software professionals.
- Post Mortem — On the topic of no blame, we approach Post Mortems with the goal of taking a clear unbiased view and then come up with ideas and actions to fix it longer term, so it never happens again.
- Fun — Even in meetings during the day we enjoy what we do and the people we work with. In the weekly product owners update, Nelson almost always ends with a song, and Tomislav always starts with a weather update from Zagreb. Some fun at work and we also get together for events like weekly boardgames or the famous Engineering days out.
- Domain knowledge — Pensions is a complicated domain, so one topic raised, especially for new starters is how do we improve people’s domain knowledge? We’re about to build out a learning and training department, who will be responsible for helping collate that information — while at the same time Engineering teams will be responsible for making sure that new features delivered are documented.
- True Self and Diversity — We seem to have built a culture where people can bring their true self to work and we have an extremely diverse team. Our culture is that everyone’s voice is heard and we’ve built an organisation where that happens, so we can build the best solutions.
- Kaizen — Continuous improvement. We’ve embraced one of the core agile principles of constantly pushing to improve. Partly as you can set a clock by the fact that I mention it multiple times a week. I mentioned it twice in the list of what we celebrate, just to make sure!
- Collaboration — People really help each other. Any request for help, you’ll have a bunch of people helping answer or sitting down and pairing with you. As we continue to scale, we’ve built communities of practice — so people working in same area (e.g. agile, react, ruby) can get together to share ideas and ways of doing things.
- Communication — This is one of those challenges as the company gets bigger is for everyone to know what’s going on. We recently tried out a longer all hands monthly Engineering meeting, to share what people were working on across teams, to mixed results. We do constantly focus on making sure people get the information that they need.
- Flat and minimal hierarchy — Smart is flat, people can talk to whoever. Some teams got a virtual high five from our MD, Will, and CEO, Andrew, during a board of directors meeting. Every Tuesday morning I run what I call “Brad’s Management Surgery”. It’s 2 hours booked out where I used to sit in a room (pre lockdown) with a video link open — anyone can drop in for however long they want to chat about anything. Often there is something I know or I can do to help you out. A 5 minute chat can save you days or worry or work. And the session gets used — the most I’ve had come visit me is 16 people.
- Onboarding — This is our biggest tweak that we’ve needed to do — we’ve got a lot to improve with how we onboard new people. We grew rather rapidly in the past 18 months and hadn’t created a great onboarding plan. Recently we’ve moved to having new starters start in the first week of every month, so we can explain in a group all the things that everyone needs to know in order to succeed.
Comments from the surveys
A few other selected comment from the feedback, with my thoughts behind them.
It’s like going to your successful uncle and aunt’s house
This has to be one of my favourite comments. We’re doing great work, changing the world of pensions, at the same time there’s a culture of friendliness and non corporate vibe.
There are a lot of good things to be said about the engineering culture. I love the focus on getting people better and more educated and the levels above being open to feedback.
I would appreciate if code reviewers would give more actionable and clear reviews where appropriate — focus on getting the other people to understand your point instead of just pointing what is wrong.
Onboarding was a bit chaotic.
We do a lot of code reviews at Smart Engineering. On average at least 6 engineers take a look at every PR, it’s part of our focus on quality and feedback. At the same time, sometimes people forget to provide clear guidance. It was a good point and something we’re working on improving. And yes, as mentioned above, our onboarding is now properly getting sorted out! Someone did want balloons on the desk on their first day, that might be the only thing we don’t do!
Equal and fair treatment of people. Managers — product owners, scrum masters, chief engineers — with the unique skills to execute equality and fairness in the teams.
We treat people fairly and with respect. Everyone’s voice is heard.
Finally, I keep saying we’re a people first company, that we are. This last comment by an anonymous member of the Engineering team is one of the clearest indicator on how we work.
It’s the unfailing and ongoing work right through the company to put the people first, always.
It’s something we see demonstrated daily, when the news of an unwell colleague results in sympathy and offers to help well before anyone wonders what the project-impact will be. It’s a warm smile in the office (or over Hangouts), because we are genuinely pleased to be working with people we care about. It’s the sitting-right-next-to-you problem-solving we witness or take part in daily. It’s the I’ve-got-your-back attitude and actions of always-supportive line-management. It’s the ongoing conversations about education, personal growth and career pathing. It’s somebody you barely know stopping by your desk to congratulate you on the birth of a child. It’s connecting in to the company’s specially-arranged anti-isolation channel over a long weekend to find it hosted by the executives; think about that for a second… some of the most senior people in the company gave up personal time over a holiday weekend in the interests of staff welfare. It’s that guy who brought you a can of Coke Zero because he’s noticed you’ve been in meetings for two hours flat. It’s about being in a place (even a virtual one) where every single person takes responsibility for the comfort and happiness of the people around them.
It’s the fact that switching from mostly-onsite to fully-remote overnight didn’t even slow us down.
It’s the anti-blame way we approach problems, coupled with broad mistake-tolerance; innovation can only thrive under these conditions. It’s the blessing to try something new, different or even (maybe especially?) status-quo-challenging. It’s the way we learn lessons from experiments whether they worked out as expected or not. It’s our never-complacent kaizen.
It’s the attitude and environment created by a huge group of people who collectively believe that good enough isn’t good enough. It’s the personal pride we all take in our extreme levels of quality and code hygiene. It’s the firm belief that what we do (and therefore the way we do it) MATTERS.
Still haven’t worked out who wrote the above note. It did resonate loudly with a lot of us at Smart Pension, both in Engineering and the wider company. It shall remain a mystery, as it should do, so it’s untainted by management.
And yes, we’re a fast scaling company. If this sounds like a place you’d like to work at, take a look at our open roles: https://www.smart.co/careers
For anyone who is directly interested, ping me on LinkedIn, I’m always happy to talk tech, Engineering culture and process or Smart Pension if it’s a place you’re looking at exploring to see if it’s a fit!
