Applying Product Thinking to Startup Culture Design

As a digital-first global company (currently spanning 8 different countries), our team holds ourselves to a high standard when it comes to culture building. We know that doing this has a huge effect on how our team feels motivated, inspired, and productive. That means intentionally designing our values, exemplifying these as lived experiences, and being active participants in moments of team connection.

This is the first post of a series about how we’re designing culture at thirdweb called CultureKit. Each post will focus on how we’re designing our digital-first culture, and key learnings we’ve found along the way.

Below you’ll discover how we’re developing our team’s values, bringing them to life, and creating moments of team connection.

Understanding team values & who they serve

It all starts with our values. How we do our work is just as important as what we do. This means being thoughtful about defining our values and evolving them into lived experiences.

We see our values as behavioural goal posts that are there to serve every team member no matter their tenure or title. After all, culture starts from the top — we expect our leaders to exemplify our values as often and as visibly as possible. We also recognize that being a growing team increases our need to stay flexible and adjust when needed. The way we see it, our values are sturdy scaffolding that holds us up as we build and may expand over time.

At the end of 2022 we polled our team to discover the level of connectedness they felt towards each other and to the company. We opened the door to create a two-way conversation between the team and the organization to better serve their needs and recognize what they experience day to day. It became a mirror, helping us understand where we are and where we needed to improve.

Notably, the result of this survey called out how the team aligned to specific aspects about our current values — like how 82% of our team feel that thirdweb is a highly collaborative place to work at while 65% felt that thirdweb is a place for continuous learning. Sentiments that are true to our values, though phrased differently.

From theory to practice: bringing values to life

If you asked someone on our team what is meant by one of our values they’d be able to easily share examples of them with you because they live them every day. This is how values go from being a written piece of content to a tangible, lived experience. But it’s not by chance, we actually designed it that way. Here’s how:

1. Identify a value. In this example, we’ll use our value of being students of web3: A value centered on low-ego learning, teaching and growing #nogatekeeping.
2. Once you’ve identified a value, consider the different levers for designing culture. This includes how you:

• Hire people on your team
• Host and run meetings
• Design team rituals
• Design your products
• Outline processes and policies
• Design digital and in-person environments

3. Think of ways to use these levers to activate your values. In-keeping with the example of being students of web3 we designed specific ways to bring this value to life. These include:

• A ‘no stupid questions’ channel in Slack — a safe space where team members can ask literally anything that comes to mind about web3 without feeling judged. (Lever: Digital Environments)
• Monthly Lunch and Learns hosted by employees — a gathering time for team members to share learnings, and insights about web3 technology and case studies. (Lever: Team Rituals)
• A learning stipend to support our team with external resources and help expand their skillset. (Lever: Policies)
• Top-notch Developer guides that enable developers of all skill levels to learn our web3 frameworks with ease. (Lever: Product)

So, our values don’t just live in our Careers or About page. Nor do they atrophy in our team handbook — we make them a real part of our everyday work.

Building connection through intentional team touch points

Being a digital first company, we know that cultivating impactful relationships is harder than if we were in a physical office. So we intentionally design moments to foster team connection. We welcome the challenge, and see it as an opportunity to design moments of purposeful team connection that enhance everyone’s experience.

Every Thursday we host a weekly team All Hands. Here are some of the things we’ve designed into this weekly touchpoint that we’ve found helpful in a digital-first environment:

Rotate hosts

• We flex the collaborative nature of our team and encourage someone new to emcee our team meeting, weekly.
• It’s up them to gather company updates, and coordinate the experience for everyone. In a text based environment where communication is heavily reliant on tools like Slack, we see great value in hearing from different people across the team every week.

Recalibrate and reorient the team

• We shine a light on the road ahead and put our score board on the big screen to talk through our stats.
• As a startup its important to emphasize individual and team accountability towards moving the needle.

Encourage popcorn praise

• Having a host share a win is one thing. But getting people to speak up and recognize each other in front of the whole company hits different. We find that team energy and morale peaks when you create space like this.

Relieve pressure through play

• Startups are a grind and people work hard. So every week we diffuse some of that pressure with (mostly non-work-related) Team Trivia! People laugh, compete and learn things about each other. Who’s the history buff? Who’s obsessed with anime?

Through repeated touch-points like these, we aim to develop more a sense of community, belonging, and inspiration, regardless of being tiny squares on a digital screen.

To recap, here are some of the broad steps we’re taking to cultivate our culture in a digital-first environment:

1. We defined our values that are authentic to our team and reflective of their lived experience.
2. We designed ways for our values to be rooted in the company, by expressing them through different culture levers.
3. We created high impact moments of team connection with our digital-first team.

Looking ahead

Our vision for our culture is one that enables our team to live their potential, and help us win as a company. That means understanding more of what our company needs and developing more ways for our team to connect. There’s a lot that we’re excited to bring to life in 2023 and we can’t wait to share more about this journey as we design it!

Author: Erika Khanna and Joher Khan
Contributors: Juan Leal