Engineering teams that collaborate cross-functionally

One of our company values is cross-functional empathy.

This plays a big role in how people at Lever interact with one another. We’re looking for team players who have empathy for the particular challenges of a given role or team. Any time there’s a challenge, we always make the assumption that everyone is doing their best and lean in to support one another rather than pointing fingers.

As an engineer, you can expect to work closely with the customer support team to learn about any pain points our customers are facing or bugs that need to be fixed. You’ll also interface with project managers (who set the tasks and organize the team), project owners (who do the research to come up with what the feature will be), as well as designers. If an issue can’t be easily resolved in Slack, we’re quick to hop on a huddle call to help move things forward. You should feel empowered and comfortable to reach out to anyone in any department if you need help or more information.

At the end of the day, while technical skill is important, we prefer candidates who can communicate what they’re working on and bring everyone on board.

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.

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.

We work as much with other company functions as we do together.

At Rune, we deeply value learning from one another. Our Product and Engineering teams work together on every project. Features have kickoff meetings where Product starts by walking engineers through the conversations they’ve had with stakeholders, whether it's patients, clinicians, researchers, or business partners. We hear the user stories and pain points. From there, we arrive at requirements together, so that everyone feels it's feasible, the scope is acceptable, the motivation is understood, and the solution is maintainable and valuable to as many different stakeholders as possible.

When working directly on data, which is often, engineers work hand-in-hand with our Neuroscience team as well. We learn about not just the structure of datasets, but also the semantics of the data and how it will be used to answer questions about the patient’s state and health.

While we value our heads-down maker time, it’s almost impossible to work alone at Rune. We have many deep technical challenges, but not the kind that can be solved well by going to a dark corner for months to tackle alone, because so much of the knowledge you need to solve them correctly lives with other people. We are not just implementing a solution to a problem – we're actively figuring out the neuroscience and data science day-by-day alongside the biggest research and clinical labs in the country, and even abroad. As new discoveries are made, we are right there too, supporting them with technology, and implementing their techniques for the entire community to make progress together.

We are all very chatty on Slack, we jump on Zoom calls when needed, and rely heavily on Quip to document everything clearly in writing so decisions and details are not lost in chat or in-person calls. While half the company is in the SF Bay Area, we're also very conscious not to ever make our remote peers feel like second class citizens.

One of our core values is that we ‘Take Action, 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.

We pride ourselves on being “glue people.”

Part of the beauty of joining an early-stage startup is getting to collaborate with the entire team. We all view each other as “glue people” meaning everyone contributes in different ways, beyond just what our titles would suggest. Engineers are welcome (and encouraged!) to participate in anything from brainstorming product ideas and designs to helping with website copy to leading discovery calls with customers (if they would like to, of course).

A big part of cross-functional collaboration means having empathy and curiosity and interest in things beyond your scope. For instance, while JJ (CEO) is involved in all things customer-facing, in her free time you can find her reading books about DevOps, following engineers on Twitter, or dipping her toes into the debate surrounding conventional commits. Similarly, Dan joined as an early product engineer, which already straddles product and engineering, but he also wears a design hat and has been helping out on the recruiting side. As one of our new hires Julio puts it, “Everyone has to be down to be a janitor.” If you’re a fan of wearing multiple hats, you’ll fit right in and we encourage you to reach out.

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 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.

Everyone at CHANI is encouraged to share their ideas.

We love to hear ideas from employees across the company, even if it’s not directly related to their department. The engineering team often considers the needs of the content and customer support teams when designing architecture. We value our sibling departments’ requests and feedback since it helps inform our decision-making. Our success as a team and as a company is dependent on working cross-functionally. In fact, we frequently have mind mapping sessions with the whole team and it’s safe to say leadership takes employee ideas for the direction of the company and its products seriously.

As a new engineer who joins the team, you can expect to work closely with the design and content teams to make sure the end product truly reflects the CHANI name, brand, and our values. You’ll also interact regularly with the technical team as well as Fatima (she/they), our Director of Operations. Working remotely can feel isolating, but that’s definitely not the case here. Every week there are full team and small group gatherings that foster community and allow teammates to interact with each other not just as employees working on the product, but human beings who belong to one team.

As a distributed team, we rely on tools like Zoom for synchronous communication, and have daily morning and afternoon scrums. It’s also important to be able to effectively communicate asynchronously, whether via Slack, notifications on pull requests, or GitHub for version control and collaboration. Regardless of your level or role, you’re always welcome to reach out to anyone on the team for help or to gain more information.

We operate as One Brex and not in silo.

Regardless of what team you join, you will work with different stakeholders across the company and gain a lot of exposure to all aspects of Brex’s business. Today, most of our major initiatives involve cross-functional work across multiple departments. We attribute the bulk of our company’s success to this approach of cross-departmental collaboration. Specifically, early collaboration across teams ranging from engineering, design, and product to finance, legal, and operations has allowed us to understand and build very complex financial products.

As an engineer at Brex, you will never be silo-ed or feel like you are on an island of your own. Another way we promote “cross-pollination” of ideas and perspectives is by hosting an annual company-wide hackathon to unleash everyone’s creative spirits. Different teams and functions come together to hack on projects ranging from designing brand new merchant icons to launching Brex Rewind – a retrospective video surfacing how our customers grew amidst all the challenges they encountered during the pandemic! Hackathons are always fun bonding experiences at Brex, and also productive!

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.

From our matrixed product teams to our Slides Carnival each year, everything we do at Seesaw is cross-functional.

We love mixing things up and making sure we’re hearing ideas and feedback from everyone at the company. Our product teams are organized cross-functionally (1 product manager, 1 product designer, and a handful of engineers). This ensures that every component from ideation to execution is taken into consideration and also gives people the chance to explore different interests, apply their skill sets to different product areas, and work with different people.

In order to develop our product roadmap, we create opportunities for individuals to share their ideas, feedback, and stories from interacting with our users. We make sure to involve members from every team (sales, engineering, content, community) so that we know exactly what will deliver the most value to our students, teachers, and parents. Even with our team being 99% remote, we are able to maintain that spirit of collaboration, whether it is through weekly virtual syncs, group Slack channels, or quick Google meets.

Finally, at the end of every year, we do a Slides Carnival where everyone at the company creates one slide with an idea or improvement for the company. They can be small fixes or moonshots, something you can do, or a project completely outside of your department. We then have a Carnival where you have 60 seconds to pitch your idea to the company. It’s a tradition of ours that is incredibly fun, but also powerfully creative. Many ideas have come to fruition as a result of Slides Carnival like our Creative Corner (we’ll explain below, so keep reading!).

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.