Many team members who were part of the founding team are still here.

Alexis Georges, Engineer and Andrea Echstenkamper, Director of Marketing have been here since 2015. We hired over 50 people in 2018 with less than 2% attrition rate. LaunchDarkly is doing bold new things to ensure our employees remain happy but above all it's our high quality of life and work/life balance that makes working at LaunchDarkly so enjoyable.

Unlike venture startups, we’ve grown because our customers find value in our products.

As an engineering team, we care deeply about how our customers and end users use our product. We focus on providing the right balance between ease of use and power-user oriented features. What this means is that engineers aren't building something just because their manager says so, but instead, everyone understands the use cases and how what they're working on brings value to the end users. By using the product and understanding our customer’s goals and behavior, we come to know the technology within this scope better than almost anyone else in the industry, and can therefore provide the best suggestions and strategy for how to solve problems.

We are a service company.

We build custom solutions for our clients. Thus, we need to understand their business and their pain points to build them a solution that will work for them. We work for a lot of smaller businesses or startups that are not yet widely known. Our bigger and more well-known clients are Bosch, Zurich, DA Direkt, SAP, and BASF.

How we communicate with our clients depends mostly on how the project is organised. If the client is part of our scrum team, engineers will communicate directly with the client. In more "traditionally managed" projects, communication is mostly channeled via PMs. When it comes to scrum, we do our meetings with the client in either our office or in theirs. Mostly, we try to rotate so that the client is regular visiting our offices as well. That seems to help to build trust in us when the client can "see" us work.

Since our marketing strategy is based on mouth to mouth propaganda, we make sure to deliver the best service to our clients.

Our customers are both developers and every day web consumers.

We are an open-source project with over >7k community developers who contribute to our code. We have a Slack channel that has >6k members and we regularly interact with people in the channel. We actively seek feedback from the community, our customers, and view feedback as a necessary component in order to build a successful product. We also have a culture of peer review and feel we can always learn from industry experts, and actively seek external opinions.

We deploy many applications on any given day.

We didn’t used to though. In 2015, when Plastiq first moved from Boston to San Francisco, we had a 2-week development cycle followed by a 3- or 4-day feature testing and regression testing cycle that would culminate in a dreaded Thursday night release. It wasn’t a great development environment and we made it a priority to improve.

We automated application builds, enabled working unit tests, and created a simple end-to-end automated regression suite. We next automated our deployments to an integration environment. Today, we’ve completed disabled our QA environment and consolidated all of our non-production environments (our integration environment is our QA and staging environment all in one!).

At Plastiq, we also use the Trunk Based Development model which means that we commit directly to the master branch. Builds and deployment are automatic and then unit, api and end to end tests are run. We are now moving toward continuous deployment so that our commits to master will be automatically deployed to production.

You can learn more about where we started and where we’re headed here.

We chose this as our first value because that’s what the data revealed, and is a value shared by the clear majority of our engineering organization.

(By the way, our data team ensured that we sampled our key:values in randomized order so there would be no artificial clustering!)

Our engineers are organized into multiple agile teams. A product owner/manager handles the product research, defines and prioritizes feature stories, and communicates with customers, while the scrum team of engineers execute the lion’s share of the work. These teams are supported by the quality, design, data, and techops teams. To that end, each product owner ensures that efforts are aligned with business/customer values, with each sprint sized appropriately to that team based on its historical performance. Rarely do teams overcommit, enabling a us to run marathons over releases than burning out over sprints.

Work hours are relatively flexible with pre-agreed standup times and scrum meetings, dependent on the internal planning by the team. Working together remotely is standard fare as we’re empowered using modern collaboration software (JIRA, Zoom, Github, etc.). We have four offices (New York, Toronto, Long Island, Lexington) across two different countries (US and Canada) and a handful of entirely-remote contributors.