The best teams focus on fundamental skills
In this world, HOW we do anything means everything.
At Shippo, Engineering is not just a series of tasks to complete: it is building a quality system that serves the company’s goals today and into the future. When we build, we build as if we will maintain it forever, favoring things like readability, testability and quality over fast-hack solutions.
We work with integrity, aiming to leave things better than we found them, valuing ownership and accountability for our work. Our job doesn’t end when code is shipped; we follow our code into production and do whatever is necessary for it to be successful over the long term.
We believe in continuously striving to learn more, and in being fearless with our work. This means leaving the comfort zone to try hard problems, ask hard questions, and take risks. If we’re not failing, we’re probably not trying hard enough.
At Shippo, when it comes to creating a work-life-balance, we believe the focus should be on the journey not the destination. For us, that means knowing yourself and knowing your own limits. We empower you to pace your work at an interval that maintains a balance with your own development goals and personal life. Your work isn’t measured on the quantity of its output, but rather the quality of the finished product.
The work we do isn’t done alone. We reach our goals by striving to continually empower the strengths of our peers. A failure is never a failure when we can take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and then reflect and share the experience we gained. We will always encourage personal growth and self development. Be generous not only towards others, but to yourself as well.
At Shippo, “Customers First” is a core value and understanding the point of view of our customers (external or internal) is key to being a good engineer. It’s also important to remember we are “bridging the distance”, figuratively and literally for businesses and their customers. We are entrusted to maintain and improve that value chain and the work we do makes a difference, good or bad.
This implies that you will take your time to gather all the context you need and to really dig in and ask why you are doing something, and how this will benefit us or our customers? This is how we can gain insights and work on something beyond just what a jira card says or a single sentence from the roadmap.
We held 4 engineering wide meetings, each with a specific topic and That's where we came up with the above core behaviors. We went around the room and asked each engineer to come up with things that mattered to them and best embodied Shippo or what we strived to be.
There was also a 5th one that needs some more thoughts, but it was win as a team but needs a little work.