Benefits of being in a great workplace culture
Impressions about my first year working at VTEX and how a good culture can allow us to impact beyond our primary role.
I completed one year working at VTEX in this month (Mar ‘19). It was an excellent year; I was hired to be responsible for a partnership between the company and the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG). So, I decided to write about this journey and how the company culture makes my job super exciting.
About the job
The primary goal of this partnership was to leverage our serverless platform, VTEX IO. My first task was to build the team, interviewing students and new grads to make part of this project. As our CEO says, “hire the top students of the computer science program” and I did. What an amazing team.
The team was responsible for creating a native ecommerce store to be used as a base for anyone that will build a store in VTEX IO. I need to share this with you because here we can see the DNA of our culture. We transform a demand that was related to our long term goals in a significant key result of our product. All this made by students and new grads.
Collaboration “as a service”
At the beginning of any job, we have a complex workload of things that we need to learn such as knowing more about the product, or what are the constraints of some API, or even how are the best practices of the stack that we will use. While my team was learning these things, I noticed a common attribute in our product team: every person that we reached was capable of stopping their current task and solving our problem or trying to find who could help us when it wasn’t about their product. This aspect is fundamental to make our community move forward, and we consider it as important as our daily tasks. Although I remained working remotely, my team quickly fitted into the company because of this.
By the way, being the only person on the product team to work remotely is hard because even though people are open to help you, sometimes the first interaction takes too long. If only I were in the office; when you know someone, you give more importance to them. But, I realized that after people know us, they start giving more attention when we reach them. And, with a little effort… 🙊
So, a few months later, I have no problem to working remotely, my team started to invite me to the meetings about a system design discussion or if we will put some critical feature in the roadmap. I believe it was a quick adjustment of all people involved.
Getting involved
Besides my primary purpose, I always try to help the company in other areas, whether it is a process or a product, and I got into things that were not part of my responsibilities. At first, I had a little concern about how my coworkers would react, but they always have the best attitude even when my ideas aren’t good enough. This sense of trust that everybody has is a very key element in VTEX.
I sought to understand deeply the business that I was getting into, which are our struggles and contribute in some way. With that, I ended up adding to the design of our new web pages language, got ideas of features to our new platform, helped to define the business model of our App Store, got involved into the definition of our hiring process model, got suggestions about how to organize our product teams. My coworkers welcome all these things. Thus, I tested “be bold”, which is one of the pillars of our culture. 😆
Collaboration is the root
What a year, right? I think that none of these accomplishments would be possible without VTEX’s culture of collaboration. I feel that this environment helped me and my team to speed up our professional growth. On the other hand, we gave back a great outcome for the company, beyond our main role.
This year, we’re looking forward to expanding the partnership with UFCG, adding two more projects, and increasing our product team with great talents that we found on this process. I’m really grateful to be able to make this partnership happen and see how great this is for all involved.
Have you enjoyed reading this? We’re hiring! 😄 See on our careers page.
