Why I’m a designer at TSheets
I joined the TSheets team not because of what they have done in the past but because of why they will succeed in the future.
If you look at our company site, or our product currently from a visual design perspective solely, you maybe disappointed. It’s not sleek or sexy, and our branding is fairly rudimentary. But our mission, culture, and talent is like nowhere else I have ever worked before. The people I work with truly care about what they do, and are experts in their related fields.
The company truly loves their employees and wants their employees to succeed at helping small businesses. Which in turn helps the company succeed and to continue to grow at an exponential pace. It’s truly a symbiotic relationship that you have to join the team to truly experience.
Our values
Our founder and CEO, Matt Rissell, cares about our company culture and makes sure we all measure up to living our core values. Which is why each new employee must memorize THE PBR.
Technology customers love.
Healthy. Work really hard. Play really hard.
Excellence. Require it from yourself and your teammates.
Players. Attract and develop the best
Be first. Innovate and win.
Relentless. Passionate about our customers’ & our company’s success.
They are not refined or polished but neither is TSheets. They are deeply rooted in our DNA as an organization and they truly depict our founders vision for the company.
We’re scrappy, resilient, and frugal
We do more with less. We practice minimalism and try to remove unnecessary garbage from our work and personal lives. That’s why we live in Idaho and refuse to follow the paradigm that every tech company must be headquartered in Silicon Valley, where you are surrounded by unrealistic living standards and expenses that are then passed onto our customers.
We choose not to participate and avoid unnecessary debt from a financial, technical, and organizational structure. We don’t have bosses… or managers. We have employees that can manage themselves and the expectations they place upon themselves to succeed.
We do have Vice Presidents of various departments that help meet with employees and give them constructive feedback to help improve their craft. We also choose not to have unnecessary policies, and organizational structure to give each team member the tools, support, and say so to make decisions that will positively impact our product.
The product team is part of engineering
For better or worse the product team is not its own department within the organization. As the product team is deeply rooted in each of development teams as they function as an equal partner within each cross-functional sprint team. So each scrum team has power to build end-to-end software solutions that can be released to our customers daily! As each team has a product owner, a product designer, and full-stack developers, so they can architect, test, and deploy within a single six person team. Which allows us to pivot and respond to our customers immediate needs. So we truly are, user centered by design.
They live up to their values
TSheets entire mission is centered around helping small businesses succeed. Which is a mission I can get behind and use all my talents and efforts in supporting. As a company, they embrace that which inspires individual growth and, more importantly, cumulative greatness as a team… and not to mention having fun while we’re at it! They have retrospectives as a development and product team to learn what went well during each sprint and what they can improve upon. After retro they have one day in between sprints where you spend an entire day working on personal development. Where you can build, read, or learn anything that will make you become a better designer than you were the day before. After which you present what you created with the rest of the team so you can get additional feedback and continued improvement.
Our users are everywhere
Working at Intel I used to have to fly across the ocean to meet with and interact with our customers to discover their specific needs. At TSheets our potential users are literally on every corner, at every social gathering, and are often even family members. And if you want to talk with current users you can drive down the road, or walk into our in-house customer experience department. It’s truly an immersive process that makes user-centered design a breeze because our customers are truly part of every department. They are the focus of all our improvements and infused into all our staff meetings. Our customers are what inform us and our collected data is what drives us so we can focus on what provides our customers with the most value.
Which as a user experience designer it gives me immense joy to be able to solve these kind of problems and release those solutions to our users on such a frequent basis.
Oh, and by the way we’re hiring :)
https://authenticjobs.com/jobs/28484/product-designer
https://authenticjobs.com/jobs/28483/senior-user-experience-researcher