Engineering teams that collaborate cross-functionally

Delivering best-in-class care is naturally a collaborative endeavor.

Curai’s core product is a virtual primary care clinic. Our engineering team builds the iOS, Android, and web applications that our patients use, as well as the web client and electronic health record (EHR) system that our clinical team uses to provide care. By nature, the work needed to deliver best-in-class care for our patients is cross-functional and collaborative.

A great example of this is the team working on building our EHR. Jen Jen Chen is a data scientist, a pediatric pulmonologist, a competitive gamer, and she serves as the product manager defining the long-term vision for our EHR. She works alongside designers, clinical operations team members, and engineers to bring the vision to life.

Mahnoor Shafi is one of the lead engineers focused on building our EHR. She considered going to medical school before deciding to become an engineer. When asked why she joined Curai, she wrote, “I wanted to join a small company where I would work on a complex problem, learn at a fast pace, and have a large impact. Having just spent a year working in an emergency room, I was drawn to Curai because they were working on issues I had seen firsthand at the hospital and wanted to help solve.” Since joining, Mahnoor has orchestrated numerous pieces of our EHR, and currently leads the charge maintaining our prescription and lab order infrastructure in collaboration with EHR-focused teammates.

As an engineer at Newfront, you'll work with world-class engineers from places like Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Uber who are eager to help and share their expertise. But you'll interact with members of other teams every day who directly impact the product we’re building.

You'll collaborate with deeply experienced insurance specialists (both brokers and account managers). As our key business stakeholders, it’s crucial we listen to their feedback around two major products: our client dashboard and account management platform. Understanding the human needs behind a product helps us engineer the best solutions.

In addition to ideation and feedback on our software, we share learnings with both technical and non-technical team members – including Newfront’s operational team in growth and marketing – to ensure our products are continuously improving and that as many people as possible get to use our work.

As a distributed company, we foster social interaction across departments through company-wide events and with the Donut app for Slack, which pairs teammates who don't usually work together to set up a virtual coffee or donut break. It’s optional, but a great way to get to know your teammates in a less formal setting. We’re also active on Slack and Zoom so everyone can stay in the loop.

We actively avoid silos.

Since people on the team live on both coasts, we make it a priority to communicate openly. We keep each other updated via Slack and Zoom, though we’re of course mindful of each other’s time and set working hours. As a new engineer on the team, you’ll collaborate closely with everyone across engineering, on both the mechanical and software side. You’ll work hand-in-hand with people on the hardware team, since our integrated platform inherently requires tight feedback loops. Depending on the project, you’ll also work with different folks on the research and web side of the software team. However, since our organization is pretty flat, we really view each other as one full-stack engineering team. Everyone in the company has access to the head of product, the head of engineering, and our CEO. You should feel empowered to reach out to whoever you need to at any time!

One of our core values is that we ‘Take Ownership, Together.’

In order to do that, we must have an environment that fosters trust based on autonomy, clarity, and accountability. We have a shared mindset to “see something, do something, and bring people along in doing it.” Data flows through every aspect of our company: our sales team works to help prospective partners understand the value they can get from working with PicnicHealth data; our Patient team helps patients work with us to unlock and retrieve their data, empowering them in their care; our Records and Operations teams work to digitize, extract, and organize valuable, key medical concepts from the records; our Clinical and Quantitative Science team works with our Data team to ensure we can deliver data that meets our research partners’ goals. As a result, our success as a company is closely tied to our ability to collaborate across teams. The quality of our product is directly tied to our ability to collaborate effectively. The only way to grow and scale is to empower everyone to be able to identify and act on opportunities, which makes working together a default expectation.

Two heads are always better than one.

People who thrive at Qualia are inquisitive, customer-focused, and – most important – collaborative. Company-wide, we seek out opportunities to share knowledge and combine efforts. Our engineers work closely with team members in all parts of the organization (particularly with Product and Design), ensuring stronger cohesion across teams and a greater overall understanding of our customers’ needs. We believe the best ideas can come from anyone, and everyone at Qualia is encouraged to ask questions, join discussions, and speak their mind.

We’re all working toward the same goal – to transform home buying and selling into a quick, simple, and secure experience. Being a cross-functional, team-focused organization is critical to our success.

It’s impossible to work in a silo here.

Given the nature of our work and how complex the user experience is, having as much context as possible is paramount. We strongly believe that no one person works on product, which is why everything from scoping a project to pairing with the right folks to execute requires a high degree of collaboration. As Alicia, one of our engineers puts it, “I’ve found at other companies that it can be easy to be siloed or only rely on a PM to think through customer user problems. At Cocoon, it’s the opposite. We’re encouraged to get many different perspectives, whether that’s working closely with customer success, support, operations, legal, and even marketing.”

As a new engineer who joins the team, you could find yourself hopping on user testing calls, collaborating with an internal team to understand and help improve their bottlenecks, or digging into specific state leave policies with the help of our legal team (we often joke that we know the California EDD website better than most people who work there). An advantage of being a small but mighty team is that you’ll have a great amount of exposure to all parts of the business. Want to shadow a sales call? Go for it! The opportunities for learning and tackling interesting, thorny problems with real-world impact are endless.

Leveraging resources across the company helps us do our best work.

Our own sales and marketing teams are the most avid users of our products. Our customer success team works closely with our customers and are the advocates and champions for their success. These stakeholders across the company are passionate and knowledgeable about the product and their involvement is invaluable when we build new products and features.

Engineers regularly work across departments as part of scoping projects and to solicit input and insights. We often dogfood new features and products, deploying early iterations internally to collect feedback, validate assumptions, and solidify long-term direction.

We have this venn diagram of developers, designers, and product-focused leaders to create our balanced team.

We really push hard within Carbon Five, as well as with our clients, to have diversity across skills. We also look for people that have low ego; strong opinions are welcome if they are loosely held. Almost every one of our developers wants to know that the thing they’re building is being used. Even if it’s not specific to product or design, they like understanding the value of what it is they’re building and having input on it.

As a four-sided marketplace, cross-functional collaboration is critical to our success.

We serve four key stakeholders:

1. consumers using our app to order groceries,
2. shoppers who are in-store and fulfilling grocery orders,
3. brick and mortar retailers on our platform, and
4. consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands who serve ads in our consumer app.

Internally, we’re organized in four key groups to serve each of our stakeholders. Our four-sided marketplace means we effectively build four interrelated, but separated products, each with their own focus, challenges, and opportunities. Each technical team is composed of mobile and full-stack engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, and infrastructure engineers. We work together to build our mobile and web apps, B2B software, fulfillment chain technologies, and advertising networks. Given how dynamic our four-sided marketplace is, engineers regularly work with product designers, product managers, finance, marketing, communications, and many other teams to scope projects, prepare for scale, and launch new features.

We’re building an experience that spans the world of bits and atoms.

We’re all a part of one team striving toward the same goal. Engineers work directly with our Kitchen teams on launching and iterating on KitchenOS software. Most of our product challenges tend to be cross-functional in nature, and solving them requires a multidisciplinary effort. We aren’t just building software, we’re building an experience that spans the world of bits and atoms. In our product reviews, we go beyond discussing how the user interacts with the UI elements on the screen – instead we step into their mindset in the kitchen.

We value in-person collaboration and typically work from the office, though we are great at distributed work since our stores are geographically distributed. We hire remotely in markets we are operating in and fly engineers to San Francisco once every other month for in-person collaboration.

One of our company values is “Tie your neighbor’s shoes.”

Everything we do is a team effort and our culture is centered around collaboration. One great example of this is our Technical Docs process. Before starting a new project, engineers are encouraged to write up their project plan. This includes any required architectural changes, pros/cons of various options, and the rollout strategy. The project plan is then shared across the entire Engineering org to encourage cross-team feedback and knowledge sharing.

We value intellectual humility and acknowledge the limits of our own perspectives, which is why we welcome both positive and constructive feedback with open arms. We host feedback training regularly to provide each employee with the tools to have productive conversations. Because another one of our core values is ‘Challenge Without Ego,’ it's important for us to give feedback to one another in a way that is professional and respectful, keeping team interests top of mind instead of our own.

Finally, we make it a priority to acknowledge and thank people for their contributions and for going above and beyond. Our #thanks Slack channel is very active with shoutouts and we end our weekly all-hands meeting with a few folks giving a “Nova Credit” to someone for demonstrating one of our company values.

Silos are actively avoided.

As an early-stage startup, team members have individual focuses, but we don’t really have departments. It’s important that everyone is connected to everything happening at the company; we embrace cross-functional collaboration because we believe it’s the best way to operate internally and deliver the best overall experience for our customers. For releases and changes, everyone has a hand in making a new feature happen. Engineers work in relatively small pods that are cross-functional in nature. These groups include mobile engineers, backend engineers, product managers, and members of the marketing or support teams depending on the project. As a new hire, you can expect to interact with other departments on a daily basis. For example, the development team often collaborates with external teams: Nichol reaches across the aisle to work with customer success to drive customer engagement; Suhaib pulls in other departments to ensure that our truckers get the experience that will best serve them; Thomas dives deep into fraud prevention working with our data team, and the list goes on. This format ensures we communicate often and share a common vision, mission, and goals.

What’s more, as a remote-first company, we know open communication and strong documentation is paramount. Engineers largely work asynchronously over Slack and Google Docs. That said, we also recognize that there is a lot of value to live problem solving, and team members meet via Zoom for those discussions. There are also periodic, optional in-person meetings in the Bay Area for both work-related conversations and social gatherings.

If transforming a vital economic industry in a fast-moving environment with a high degree of creativity, ownership, and collaboration speaks to you, check out our open roles!