Engineering teams that cultivate open communication

Transparency is core to who we are and what we’re building.

At Makelog, we’re building a release communication product that helps technical and non-technical teams communicate more effectively with each other and with customers. After spending several years at various B2B SaaS companies, we experienced firsthand how difficult it was to communicate product updates to enterprise customers who value having insight into the product roadmap – Are companies working on the features customers care most about? Are they fixing bugs that are being reported? What exactly is being shipped and when? However, most companies only communicate big feature or product launches since it’s too tedious to share every little thing that ships with the right people. Thus, there’s often a huge lack of transparency around the longtail of updates. We founded Makelog to help companies better communicate product updates with the right stakeholders in a clear, thoughtful, and beautifully-designed way. This is especially important now as the tech world is increasingly moving toward CI/CD, where product changes are an everyday occurrence.

As a small team, we rely on open and effective communication with one another. Whether it’s sharing learnings, giving feedback, noting concerns or celebrating wins – being a strong communicator ensures we’re all rowing in the same direction. There’s a lot of asynchronous communication via Notion and Slack, but we’re also happy to hop on a Huddle or Zoom call whenever needed (and sometimes because we just enjoy having facetime, too). For our daily standup, we use StatusHero, which helps us understand what everyone’s priorities are for the day. In addition to team meetings every Monday, we also have regular 1:1s with each other to help avoid silos. Every month or so, we do a virtual team bonding session using fun tools like Icebreaker, Dive, and Around. Last but not least, it only makes sense that we share our changelog out in the open – you can check it out here!

Open communication is part of our day-to-day life at Rune.

At the most rudimentary level, we practice open communication by having open document standards: anyone can see the work of any other department. This extends all the way to the executive team’s weekly agenda and notes.

More importantly, we set the expectation that concrete, explainable reasons must back our decisions; this goes double for leadership. We have a company-wide all-hands every week and engineering has an all-hands every two weeks where leadership provides updates, and we raise topics for discussion ranging from things that affect our work/life balance (e.g. moving our daily production deploys so that east coast folks don't have to be online too late) to our process (e.g. how we want to use Asana).

Technical planning is done on shared documents open to everyone, so that architectural decisions and discussions about them are transparent. If we introduce tech debt, it should be a conscious choice, and every engineer should know why we made that choice, and how/when we plan to address it.

At weekly meetings for each stack team (backend, mobile, frontend), the agenda includes "emerging issues" - a space for everyone to bring concerns about problems they feel are creeping in under the radar. These are issues that cause (sometimes subconscious) anxiety in us, and making it safe to make that a shared responsibility – and not wait until it's a tangible problem – is something we value greatly.

We also practice frequently bringing up topics around our emotional health, stress levels, or even concerns about the future that can sometimes be hard to put precisely into words (like how we plan on preserving our values as we grow). For example, instead of a "what are you doing?" check-in in Slack, we have an optional prompt based on a mindfulness exercise: "As I start the week, I feel ___. The body sensation I'm most aware of is ___". We set an expectation that leadership is allowed to show vulnerability, to admit when they are feeling stretched, or worried about meeting a goal, or disappointed in their own performance. Every staff meeting begins with a Health Check where we report both on our own and our teams' mental health.

Every six weeks we have company-wide retrospectives. In the past, team members have felt comfortable sharing their feelings when UI designs change too often, when we've lost a team member, when our process has holes AND when it starts getting in the way, when OKRs don't provide any guidance, when deadlines aren't realistic, when expectations aren't being clear, or when we're exhausted with Zoom fatigue and need to set some boundaries.

Transparency is a core value of ours.

We are a fully remote company spread across 10 cities and six countries, and being able to work asynchronously is a must. This requires a high degree of trust in one another and effective communication, especially when faced with difficult questions. A quality we embrace at CoinTracker is being able to candidly say, “I don’t know.” It is far more impressive to admit not knowing than it is to deflect or bullshit. If you can readily admit that you need help, or don’t have all the answers, we know we can trust you.

In our day-to-day operations, we encourage folks to communicate in Slack group threads instead of via direct messages – 75% of Slack messages are in public channels. If you’re a new hire who has recently joined the team, we’ll ask you to post questions about your individual progress or how to personally prioritize your task list openly in our #eng channel as opposed to in direct messages to your manager. Everyone on the team (from interns to our CEO) has access to investor updates, financials, and key metrics. This allows everyone to be on the same page and act in the company’s best interests with full transparency.

A consistent refrain at CoinTracker is how trusting and transparent we are with one another, an example often demonstrated by our leadership team. At a time when we were just coming off of crypto winter (2020) and simultaneously at the height of the global pandemic, our growth wasn’t where we knew it could be. During this period, we relied on openness and honesty. We had a weekly all-hands where our founders (Jon and Chandan) shared in-depth status updates and discussed everything we were doing to extend our runway (such as expense reductions). They made sure to dedicate the time to answer any and all questions with complete candor. While some people decided the risk wasn’t worth it for them, we fully supported them in their transition to their next role. Keeping open lines of communication allowed us to successfully navigate this challenging period and become an even stronger company, with our values and mission closely aligned. We’re now growing 15x YoY. 🙌

We believe in sharing information.

We strive for our employees to feel empowered to share any idea big or small, regardless of whether they’re an apprentice who’s been here for a month or an engineer like Emma, who’s been with us for over six years. What does this look like, you ask? We host weekly Friday Shares where staff are encouraged to take the mic and talk about what they’ve been working on or learning. For example, our Technology Director, Mike, recently hosted a talk called “Failure is Always an Option,” and one of our Lead Engineers (and comic book creator) is hosting another titled “Not Just Another George Lucas.” From 1:1 relationships, to project teams, to the collective studio, we’re big on sharing openly and often so we can learn from each other.

Every engineer’s career goals are taken into consideration from day one. Bi-weekly 1:1 conversations with their managers and bi-annual reviews are baked into our processes. We also hold monthly engineering meetings where the internal processes and department goals are constantly re-evaluated. Although we have multiple teams working on different client projects, all of our communication is done within public Slack channels, so anyone can jump in and see the process.

Open communication is particularly important as we (and the rest of the world) have pivoted to remote work. While it's tempting to schedule a lot of meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page, we've worked hard to balance the need to feel connected with the burnout associated with a week full of Zoom meetings. We lean heavily on tooling – Figma for collaborating on design and presentations, GitHub for code, Dropbox Paper, and Google Docs for documentation, and Trello and Jira for project management. Being disciplined in using these tools to plan and execute our work asynchronously has helped us reserve calendars for the truly impactful synchronous activities (like our monthly Trivia Nights!).

Our goal is to continuously have feedback that helps us evolve our practices and approaches.

As a company, open communication and transparency is important. For example, the same decks that are shared with the board are also shared with engineers. Within engineering, we share our JIRA boards with customer support teams, so we can openly discuss bandwidth and prioritize work accordingly. Engineers work on teams with a dedicated product manager and designer, so there’s a high degree of collaboration and open communication around the roadmap and features we’re building.

The engineering org is also designed in a way that ensures managers are not maxed out with direct reports. Many senior engineers choose to mentor more junior engineers. For instance, with the support of a senior engineer, two interns changed the user interface and revamped the script messaging overrides, so companies can easily tweak their interviewing scripts. Elayne, one of our engineering managers, likes to block time on her calendar for anyone to ask questions or seek help exploring a different part of the codebase. There’s also regular (optional) shared working time, where anyone can drop into Zoom to collaborate.

We operate with transparency around the business, our product, and how decisions are made.

We understand and are respectful of the fact that people need time and space to focus on their work. At the same time, we also believe better decisions are made when all members of the team are well informed. By being transparent about as much as possible, we make information accessible whenever possible. Everyone knows how much runway we have, how investors meetings went, about strategic partnerships, and is included in all hiring decisions.

Underlying trust allows us to speak frankly with one another and enables us to build an environment where people are encouraged to voice their questions, criticisms, and/or concerns. Because we truly respect each other, open communication feels effortless. Whether you agree or dissent, all opinions are valuable and will be heard.

In terms of day-to-day communication, a handful of us work together in a shared co-working space in San Francisco (PARISOMA), and the rest of the team is distributed working remotely. We recognize that working remotely comes with its own set of challenges, and strive as a team to make this a good experience on all sides. We use a combination of Zoom, various collaboration software (e.g. Notion, Google Docs, Github), and messaging on Coast (our own product) to tackle each new project or goal together as a team.

We also bring the entire team together for regular off-sites in person to ensure we get to know each other on a personal level so our team gels as a whole. At the end of the day communication is everything: healthy teams move fast because they trust each other, and trust is built through good communication.

Our success relies on transparency.

We believe it takes the full engagement of every team member to build a truly successful and impactful business, which is why transparency is so crucial. The entire company meets regularly to align on the goals of the business and each department as well as to celebrate our successes. At our bi-weekly all-hands we openly hear from leadership as well as a specific department (which rotates) so everyone is in the loop on how we’re doing and what’s in the pipeline. New hires are also introduced at these meetings so we can get to know you (think sharing a few photos and a fun fact or two).

Similarly, the product and engineering team maintains an open and collaborative approach to product design and development, soliciting input from across the team to ensure alignment and well-informed execution. While we’re happy to hop on a 1:1 call as needed, we also emphasize open transparency via Slack channels so everyone can stay in the loop. Given our fast-paced environment, we recognize that mistakes will happen along the way, but we always look for the learning opportunity. That’s why we practice blameless post-mortems and never single out individuals if things don’t go exactly as planned.

You’ll be called to tackle projects that have a direct and outsized impact on the success of the business and our customers. Our commitment is to equip you with the knowledge and the environment you need to feel closely connected to the goals of the business in your daily work. We want you to feel like you are not just writing code but rather contributing directly to the ongoing success of Qualified as a whole.

Transparency starts at the leadership level.

Every few months we have an anonymous culture survey executed by a third party. Part of this survey is giving honest feedback to the leadership team directly, which execs then share with the company. Our leaders openly discuss the personal feedback they received even if it’s hard to share and talk about what they’re working on to address; the good, the bad, and everything in between. Everyone in leadership also participates in 360 surveys (also administered by a third party) so they can get even more detailed feedback about how to improve.

As a remote first company, we heavily favor communication via Slack, so you can really know about and get involved in anything you’d like. However, we’re very mindful of Slack fatigue and don’t expect engineers to always be online. We also try to move longer discussions to documents. Our physical office is there for those who would like, but it’s not mandatory since all of our hardware can be accessed remotely.

When we onboard new engineers, we intentionally connect you with lots of different people across the company so you can forge relationships and gain the context you need to succeed. Engineers are encouraged to jump in from day one and can always grab time on anyone’s calendar. We find that because you have so much power to get involved with any project at any time, it’s hard to become cynical. We’d be lying if we said complaints never happen, but it’s usually not long before we ask, “What can we do about that?” and often the answer is only a meeting or PR away.

In order to communicate effectively with each other, we’ve established and written down a set of norms for when we communicate.

These norms are especially important to us at Aptible since most of our communication happens over Zoom, Slack, or email. Being remote forces us to communicate in a way that working in person may not allow. We often create explanatory collateral rather than simply pulling a co-worker into a meeting room and we’ve developed a culture of permanence and accessibility around documentation that we are confident will be invaluable as we scale. Being remote requires that communication between teammates and teams more broadly is thoughtful and intentional each time.

Whether it's the daily scrum standups (we’re constantly working to streamline and improve the efficacy of these), weekly 1:1’s (where you have free reign to set the agenda with your manager), or our bi-weekly all-hands (where we come together as a team to hold ourselves accountable to our goals and enjoy some face time), here are a few of the general practices we promote to ensure positive and effective communication:

• Establish clear goals. The goal doesn’t necessarily need to be a deliverable – it could be “brainstorm,” “get aligned,” etc. – the only requirement is that every participant is clear and in agreement on the goal(s).
• Clearly articulate the purpose and desired outcome of the meeting. Distribute the agenda and/or deck, so participants can review in advance.
• Identify and rotate roles. This might mean rotating functional roles – like “MC,” “scribe,” “timekeeper,” etc. It also could mean experimenting with rotating communication roles, like those described in Kantor’s Four Player Model of Communication.
• Be present. Core behaviors include: Participate in meetings, Don’t check Slack, email, etc. Focus your attention on speakers and make appropriate eye contact.
• Constantly seek to improve meetings to make them more useful. Identify when scheduled/recurring meetings have outlived their purpose and cancel them.

There are many more norms where those came from – including more tips on how we use Slack and Zoom effectively and with empathy.

Candid feedback, given respectfully, accepted seriously

Since our earliest days, Angaza has straddled an ocean. The challenges of keeping our San Francisco and Nairobi teams in sync have shaped our culture. We actively and explicitly practice open communication, both across the entire company and within each smaller team.

We put a lot of energy into ensuring the right conversations are happening between the right people. The entire company joins our monthly all-hands call, which emphasizes transparent communication and live Q&A. Leadership schedules regular office hours, where any topic is fair game. We distribute a biweekly newsletter, featuring both company updates and Angazan personal highlights.

Within the engineering team, much of our written communication comes in the form of PR comments. We provide thoughtful, constructive comments for our colleagues, strive to minimize bikeshedding and rubber-stamping, and foster an environment where every engineer feels both empowered to comment and heard when they do.

In cases of fundamental disagreements, whatever the decision, our style is to ensure that the cost of course correction is not prohibitively expensive, document the discussion, and then defer to the individual or team with the most at stake.

Radical over-communication, please!

Everyone has access to the same information, and no one is left in the dark about important company decisions. The transparency our leaders have with the rest of the company about board meetings (they always share slides and documents presented), timelines, and dissenting opinions creates a culture where Novans feel comfortable speaking up about any topic, which is why one of our core values is 'Challenge Without Ego'. At the end of every all-hands, there’s the opportunity for anyone to ask questions live, via zoom chat, or our #questionsforallhands channel.

Almost all of the work we do requires cross-functional expertise and teamwork, which is why we rely on open communication about details, requirements, deadlines, and processes. We are heavily biased toward giving too much information rather than not enough.

An example of this is our blameless and cross-functional Post-Mortem process. Incidents are unfortunately inevitable, but they are great opportunities to learn as a team. We use PMs as a tool for documenting incidents, analyzing root causes and outcomes, and identifying action items to prevent the incident from occurring again.

Another way we over-communicate is through our internal groups and brown bag lunches, where employees share in depth about a topic or experience they're passionate about. At Nova, open communication extends to those outside of the company, too. We host fireside chats with industry professionals, bringing in amazing, high-profile individuals into the office for open discussions on various topics. For APA heritage month, we hosted community organizers from API Equality – Northern California to discuss the Asian-American experience and how to support fellow Novans and API members.

An informed team member is an empowered team member.

Each of us has experienced what it feels like at other companies when decision making is divorced from facts on the ground. It is extremely demoralizing when you are the expert and are not empowered to make important decisions or even sit at the table where they are made. Not only does it stifle individuals at a company, but it is also a sign of poor leadership that will likely make bad decisions, and eventually lead the company in the wrong direction.

Our approach is to practice email transparency and share all information (except when it specifically has to be confidential – e.g., HR information). We embrace the accountability that this brings. By having access to all information, individuals can make informed decisions. Additionally, it encourages people to reach out and get any additional information they need: engineers talk to banks to understand how they work and form a relationship and our customer success team frequently collaborates with engineers on prioritization and debugging.

Our management philosophy can be summed up as: one team with each individual having the responsibility and authority to get their job done. If your problem goes beyond your domain, then it’s up to you to get help from another person and ultimately bring that project across the finish line.

As a distributed team, Slack is our office.

As a fully remote team, communication is critical. Not just for getting things done, but also for team building. We lean into this by over-communicating, on Slack and on video calls as well. We use video calls for planning work, pair programming to tackle particularly hard challenges, and helping give context of a certain code area to team members who are missing that context. We also use video calls for fun things, from hanging out to celebrating wins to just sharing stupid videos.

We have two all-hands meetings a week to connect as a team and make sure everyone is on the same page. On Mondays, we spend half an hour reviewing high-level updates from last week as well as what’s to come this week. At the beginning of each kickoff call, Joe, our founder and CEO, always gets us started by talking openly about what’s on his mind. On Fridays, we spend about an hour wrapping up the week, which includes a show and tell section, where different team members share what they’ve been working on. We also have a section dedicated to an open floor Q&A – affectionately known as “Q&Chaos” – where you can ask anything that’s on your mind. In this time, people ask big picture questions about the business or dive into the details of a new feature we’ve shipped. People also take this as an opportunity to be silly and irreverent, like debating the merits of guac versus queso.

Our vision is that anyone here can see at any time how their work is contributing to the goals of our company. We want everybody to be able to quickly and easily understand why they’re doing the work they’re doing and how it's going to make an impact.

We believe in transparency and optimize for asynchronous communication.

As a distributed team, we are async-first. While we’re looking for engineers who live in time zones compatible with the US, we optimize for asynchronous communication via text. We still have face-to-face time, but it's much more intentional.

We have transparent discussions around product and engineering decisions out in the open. These range from technical RFCs to proposals for new features in the product. Since every team member can access these long-form discussions, this means that any team member can go back in time and read why certain decisions were made and what trade-offs were considered at that time. This enables every engineer to contribute.

To us, kindness means creating a culture where everyone has a voice and speaks up. Each team member is encouraged to express what they think would be best for the product, the team, and the company. We speak to each other directly, we disagree amicably, and we remain kind and respectful in all conversations.

We place a premium on transparency and it starts at the leadership level.

As a company, we value transparency and our CEO, Eduardo, sets a good example. In addition to a weekly office hour where he’s happy to answer any questions, he also holds AMAs at our monthly company all hands. We also use this time to discuss exciting milestones, product updates, customer stories, and monthly sales wins.

While team members span both coasts, we make sure everyone stays in the loop by communicating regularly via public Slack channels. Meeting calendars are also open, so anyone can attend any meeting if they’d like. Finally, we use a shared Google Drive, so everyone has access to company resources.

Trust and transparency are foundational to how we operate.

We believe that everyone should have the context they need to do their jobs well, and that “how I’m doing” is a crucial piece of that context. We avoid leaving important things unsaid, which means we’re willing to have difficult conversations or give constructive feedback as needed.

Feedback is a part of everyone’s job, and we expect our managers and leaders to model giving and soliciting direct, actionable, and kind feedback. We try to quickly build trust with new team members, and we always assume good intent and competence in others.

As a distributed team, we invest in formalizing our communication and working norms to remove ambiguity. During onboarding, new hires create user guides that describe their working style and communication preferences. Our engineering team also co-creates and maintains a working agreement that includes norms like asking questions in public forums and discouraging information silos. Even if a question could be answered by one person, we default to a public channel, so the information can be seen by more team members, and the resolution of the question can be documented.

As a company, we place a premium on clear and frequent written communication.

Since we’re a distributed team, we have developed most of our company processes to be remote first. We deprioritize email in favor of Slack and Notion – they’re way more collaborative.

Being able to capture one’s thoughts in writing is a revered and celebrated skill at AngelList. Our weekly team-wide standup is done exclusively through writing (yes, with more than 16 people in the meeting). Updates are written in Notion before the meeting starts and we spend the next 20-25 minutes reading and commenting on those updates, in silence. It’s surreal and almost comical the first time you experience it, but the value of the meeting is that all of the micro-interactions are covered in writing and folks who can’t make it because of the time zone (or life) can read it when they have a chance and gain close to 100% of the context.

We’re open in the way we share information and feedback with each other. We trust our employees – whether it’s our financial numbers (which are made public for everyone to see) or the reasoning behind an important business decision, we prioritize being open and transparent at all times. We encourage each other to share feedback early and often, and have spent time discussing how to give and receive feedback effectively.

Despite our remote-friendly processes, we value being able to spend time together. We typically host one offsite every year to bring the entire team together; previously we’ve gone to places like Thailand, Tulum, Colombia, and Hawaii. We weren’t able to meet in 2020, but once it’s safe to do so again, we’re planning to make up for it with an even more glorious offsite 🙂.

We are so much more than code, pipelines, models, and metrics.

You can be one of the best engineers in the world, but the impact of your work depends on how well you communicate and work with your team. Instacart has many moving parts, making whole ownership, as mentioned previously, so important to success. To facilitate cross-functional collaboration, we host regular “Hackers Lunch” meetings where engineers share their recent work and keep others informed of what projects are important to them. In the past, people have presented on topics like The New PagerDuty, Efficient Services, Technical Writing for Fun and Profit, and Building Availability Models.

At a company-wide level, we meet on a monthly basis for our All-Hands where leaders share updates on projects, launches, and larger announcements. Our CEO also hosts a weekly AMA series, where she answers questions that are top of mind for employees. And our employee-led Employee Resource Groups hold regular internal discussions about topics of interest.

Information should be available to everyone.

Everyone at Mode has the resources at hand to answer questions or validate assumptions. After all, this is one of the core value propositions of the software we are building. Every team member is an owner of the company, so progress is reported frequently and transparently. This information is typically shared in the form of presentations about company financials and direction at our weekly all-hands meetings, as well as through reports that display core company metrics.

After much thought and consideration, we (excitedly!) decided to begin hiring fully remote engineers in 2019. While we knew it wouldn’t be perfect at first, it positioned us well for the transition to remote work during the pandemic. We've invested in state-of-the-art telecommunications hardware and software, now run meetings as if all attendees were remote, and make decisions in forums where remote members can participate.

If you work out of our office in San Francisco, you’ll sit with your cross-functional team (product, design, engineering, and customer support). We have a quiet room for when you need a break from the open office layout and office pups who lovingly sit nearby.

“We write things down” is one of our operating principles.

Having a strong documentation culture is key to our success. It forces rigorous thinking, reflection, and enables better context and knowledge sharing. This helps us be radically transparent: we have open email lists and documentation, and share strategic context like board meeting notes and fundraising plans internally so everyone is empowered with the same information.

Without a shared writing culture, information becomes siloed (even with the best of intentions!), goals become unclear or misaligned, and it’s hard to execute efficiently. Many companies default to adding more and more review or “sign-off” processes in order to make sure the right decisions get made, which is the opposite of the autonomous culture we want to build. Our HQ office is in San Francisco, but we’re remote-friendly, and writing things down is important to keep everyone in the loop. To make sure we’re remote-inclusive, we also have certain virtual norms, such as having your individual camera on during Zoom meetings, even during company-wide all-hands.

On the engineering team, we have several Slack channels for folks to ask questions about different projects and share information. Outside of our weekly engineering all-hands, meeting cadence varies depending on the team, but we try to be as intentional as possible about synchronous time. Whether you like to pair program or prefer to work more independently, we have team members who enjoy different working styles. In fact, one of the first things new hires do is write a “Working With Me” doc describing their working style and preferences. We then share these during team meetings so we can get to know each other a little better, and if you’re curious about how someone on a different team prefers to work, you can always access those docs, too!

The best decisions are made by proactively communicating with everyone who might thereby receive or add value.

This nearly always means capturing it in written form, and Airtable is very much a written culture: project specs, meeting notes, retrospectives, market opportunity analyses, and other documents, including our CEO Howie's reports to our board of directors, are all duly written up and circulated widely, in most cases to all full-time staff. Engineers regularly write documents that receive direct feedback from sales or other customer-facing teams, and vice versa.

Furthermore, we strive to establish a social context in which people have the right expectations about authoring proposals or commenting on them. First, we encourage people to share as much information as possible: not only proposed actions and decisions, but also the context and motivations that prompted them. This allows readers, who do not already have that context, to engage more effectively. Second, we practice empathetic communication and discourage excessive pride of authorship. Ideas can only be shared early and often if people feel secure that their half-baked or highly speculative ideas will be welcomed as a starting point rather than attacked for their imperfections. On the other hand, the process of iterating and refining proposals can't work if people start out too attached to (or personally identified with) particular versions of an idea. Without these critical values, no software tool can create a culture of open communication.

Like many other companies, we use Slack for real-time communication. However, we also recognize the many limits of chat-style communication and strongly bias toward capturing discussions wherever reasonable in documents, tickets, and other durable media (including, of course, Airtable bases). We believe the best decisions are often made with ample time, discussion, and thought, which are best supported by asynchronous collaboration.

(A strongly written and asynchronous communication culture has other benefits, too. It's better for work done outside our main offices, or on time-shifted schedules. Also, it enables a greater proportion of focused “maker time” compared to a culture where everyone feels obligated to actively monitor chats for fear of missing out on important conversations. Of course, there are plenty of times when real-time chats or meetings really are the best way to communicate, and we embrace those situations. But we try to deploy these communication modes thoughtfully.)

We are direct.

We make each other better by being honest, transparent, and speaking up. The best ideas can come from anywhere and we’re not afraid to learn from our mistakes or change our minds. In order to iterate quickly, we have direct conversations to get to the point and make timely decisions.

In our day-to-day, everyone has access to all of the information they need to make informed decisions. Slack channels, Notion, and Google Docs are open and we do our best to keep meetings light. In general, meeting culture is based around our plan meetings, with anything else being ad hoc or specific to an outcome that needs to be achieved.

“Default to Transparency” is one of our core values.

Working in a globally distributed team means open communication is a must. Sharing context, goals, objectives, and in-progress work helps us stay on the same page and achieve our common goal: building the best products and experiences for our users. We rely on several work tools to collaborate and are very active in Slack, where we default to open channels. If you have a question, it’s likely someone else has the same one. Having everything out in the open gives others the opportunity to chime in, collaborate, and yields an answer even faster. It also helps cement an environment where everyone feels safe to make mistakes or ask silly questions.

In addition to our rich documentation culture, feedback is ingrained in everything we do. For example, we all have personal ReadMe docs that share how we like to receive feedback (e.g., openly in Slack, privately, in-the-moment, or later after they’ve had time to digest).

When it comes to meetings, we follow a scrum ritual (daily standups, sprint review, retros, and backlog grooming). Daily standups at 8am PST tend to be a great way to pass the baton; our West Coast team members are starting their day, while folks in Europe are wrapping up. However, these meetings (and most at Zapier) are always optional. Of course, we try to attend every meeting we can, but we understand that people have different responsibilities. If someone can’t attend, we make sure to share all of the relevant information so they can provide their input.

One of our core values is “we build in public” and we mean that.

Unlike at many other startups, we place a large emphasis on transparency. Avoiding silos is key and we’re very active in Slack. Having a written culture allows people to easily jump in where needed or catch up (we don’t expect you to be green on Slack 24/7). Whether it’s at our all-hands meeting on Monday, company-wide check-in on Wednesday, or daily standups, information flows freely. In fact, our CEO, Kim, leads the first two meetings and openly shares important information. Similarly, Benton, our VP of engineering, encourages engineers to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts (the good, the bad, and everything in between) during 1:1s or as an issue arises. We also emphasize candid feedback during our weekly retrospectives and make sure everyone has the opportunity to share their thoughts.

Last but not least, we believe in checking egos at the door and working from a place of high compassion. In other words, a developer is not their code – we strive to give the type of feedback we’d hope to receive. Being thoughtful communicators allows us to lean on each other and empower one another to speak up and be heard. This is something we actively screen for during interviews – we want to see how you articulate your ideas (which is always more important to us than whether you arrived at the right answer).

Regardless of role or experience, we all have something to share and learn from each other.

Clear, open communication is fundamental to how we work. We actively work to create opportunities to share context, regardless of seniority, role or location. If you have ideas about how to make something better, we want to hear it! Since we span several time zones, we make sure to update people in Slack, share Paper docs, and record important meetings so that everyone has the same context. For example, when there was uncertainty with the pandemic, leadership kept everyone informed with a weekly company update on Slack.

We also foster open communication with bi-weekly tech talks, where team members have the opportunity to share short demos or discuss what they’ve been working on. Engineers who are subject matter experts in a certain area or part of the stack also rotate every week and make themselves available to answer any questions during office hours.

Teams are organized based on the product area you work on, so we don’t have a dedicated front-end or back-end team. In order to encourage open dialogue across product teams, we have several different guilds composed of people with similar technical interests. Guild meetings generally happen every two weeks, and it’s a great time to discuss best practices, how we can improve on our architecture, or certain aspects of our system.

Collaboration is key, and you should feel comfortable going to anyone at any time if you’re feeling stuck or want to understand something better. Want to pair? There’s always someone willing to do so. We’re lucky to have a strong, talented team that is excited to help you learn new things and wants to learn from you, too.

We believe transparency is the key to our moving in the same direction together.

Brex has a transparent written culture (or memo culture), which makes it easy to learn about various parts of the business at any time. We document everything – company-wide strategy, OKRs, key metrics – in Google docs and share them internally. We’re even transparent about our compensation structure and encourage interested applicants to understand our approach before deciding to apply.

Once you join Brex, you’ll see that communication styles vary across teams. We give individual teams a lot of flexibility to determine what communication style works best for them and the individuals who compose the team. While we had always planned on becoming a remote-first and international company, COVID-19 helped push that agenda. We will continue to be remote-first post-COVID and improve our communication culture to accommodate our growing company.

Today, two of our favorite communication practices include our regular Q&A’s with the leadership team (where you can ask about anything you may want to learn more about) and weekly emails from our founders. Each week, our founders send an email to the entire company about major updates, decisions, and the why behind them. Here are two great examples from Pedro (founder and co-CEO) around why a growth mindset is so important to him and how to increase the quality of our decisions. Let us know what you think!