Making a start-up worth getting up for.

What makes our company worth getting up for? We ask ourselves this everyday.

We’re small. We’ve raised $1.1m, launched our app and are rapidly building our team and audience. So what? A lot of companies are in a similar position.

For us, it’s our culture that separates us from other companies. This is the first time we’ve written it down, we haven’t forced it, it’s been a natural process as we all want to work in a great development environment.

We don’t have rules but these are headlines that we follow:

• Hire exciting people
• 20% time
• Peer programming/review
• Zero creep Agile
• BDD
• We share
• We do stuff
• We have fun

Hire exciting people

We want to come to work excited about what we’re going to create, to hear about the problem someone solved last night and to share ideas about the app, industry or whatever.

But being exciting doesn’t mean party all night, go skiing and fly back on a private jet at the weekend. It’s about exciting the minds of others around them, about discovery and sharing.

We want to work with people who care about technology and its application. Those that constantly look for ways to improve their work and the team around them. Those that have non-work passions, organise events, protest, change things and in someway disrupt the world around them.

20% time

But hiring exciting people is only the beginning. It doesn’t take long for an exciting person to get tired of a stagnant environment. Any project can get tedious after working on the same stuff day in, day out. Sup provides some super interesting challenges, many of which we haven’t figured out, but we all need to fix the itch of intrigue from time to time.

This is why we have 20% time. A concept popularised by Google, 20% time allows us to spend 20% of our week working on whatever we like. A lot of companies talk about this but don’t actually push it through because they are too busy. For us, this is a classic “too busy cutting down a tree to sharpen the saw” scenario.

A tech team is always busy and as a company we only have a small time frame to form our culture. This is why we do it now. In fact, we build it into our sprints and we tell each other off for not doing it.

Peer programming

Everyone at Sup has something unique to bring to the team and we believe that the only way to share this knowledge is to show and tell teammates through peer programming.

It is not only important when learning new skills but when writing tests to challenge each other to build the most simple and robust code possible.

Zero creep Agile

We work in an agile environment to create realistic expectations for everyone. This protects 20% time and allows us as a company to make better decisions on priority.

Most importantly, we don’t allow creep. We hate creep and we like to be happy. We also run flat structures, quick daily standups, retrospectives and release trains.

BDD

We write tests to design better code, increase confidence and for documentation. We don’t care about our percentage of coverage, we focus on core behaviours and write tests before we write code.

As a team, we decide what should be tested and when we’re happy with tests for a given behaviour. We don’t test for future functionality and we don’t optimise prematurely.

We talk about what we do

It’s critical to put ideas up for criticism. If we don’t share what we do then we don’t learn. But equally, having exciting people on the team means that we have things to share too.

We do stuff

Most importantly to us, we get stuff done. We’re output-oriented as we’ve all experienced jobs where features are talked about only to be relegated to the bottom of the backlog and then quietly assassinated.

It only took us one week to implement and release 3D Touch. We keep our discussions short and to the point. We save the rambling conversations for the pub.

We have fun

One of the core business principles is to have fun. We love what we do and who we work with. We don’t force fun: hang out if you want or not. But we’re pretty good at COD, product ideas and getting on guest lists.

If you’re interested in building awesome things with us, come and say hello supmenow.com or download the app supme.co.