Our Company Vision
We help bridge the distance between businesses and their customers 🌉 🙌
Shippo brings businesses closer to their customers by making shipping effortless. We enable magical moments where the digital and physical worlds converge.
- Customers For The Win - We put our customers first in everything we do.
- We Value Short Feedback Loops - It’s ok to fail, but we need to move quickly and learn as we go.
- We Are Passionate About Hard Challenges - We embrace hard challenges. Everyone can solve easy problems.
- We Are Optimists - We approach everything with positivity and energy. Our attitude is solutions oriented.
- We Are High In Conscientiousness - We are responsible and reliable team members.
- We Haven’t Won Yet - We set high goals and push the boundaries.
To engineer user-centric shipping experiences that grow the Shippo network.
Defined as: The system in which the team executes, makes decisions and behaves as a collective group
(sorry it's not about our free lunches, great benefits and awesome office 😉)
First we need to define a common language so we all know what we're talking about:
To achieve long term company success, teams should be in the learning zone and exemplify our core values by adopting core behaviours and make decisions by measuring what matters.
We believe that the two important elements to unlocking team (and company) success are:
- Psychological Safety - This means ensuring that no one is penalized if they ask for help or admit a mistake.
- Intrinsic Motivations and accountability through Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Adopting core behaviors and measuring what matters helps us reach the "learning zone".
**Note - The above image was taken from this blog which is based on research by Amy Edmondson
These individual behaviors will make our team stronger 💪
| Behavior | Re-enforces Core Value |
|---|---|
| Code it like you're going maintain it forever | Customers For The Win |
| Dare greatly | We Are Passionate About Hard Challenges |
| Be kind to yourself | We Are High In Conscientiousness |
| Ask Why? | Customers For The Win, We Are Optimists |
Read more details and some anti-patterns.
We establish company wide OKRs and then spend each quarter working on building a bottoms up approach to defining team OKRs that will help move the needle. The current 2020 OKRs are as follows:
- All new e-commerce businesses choose Shippo
- Expand product value upmarket to larger ecommerce merchants
The second part is having CFRs (continuous, feedback, recognition), which is using 1x1s, our OKRs software and giving each other meaniful and timely feedback to help reach our goals. When key results don't make sense anymore, we adjust them, and we're always looking to improve them.
Phew, thats a lot to take in. So how do we take all these concepts and put it in practice at Shippo? By making it part of our day to day activities like these:
- Tightly coupled product and engineering collaboration to ensure we're building the right things based on available resources and reasonable time estimates
- 1x1s focused on you.
- Hackathons to try new things and have fun doing it
- We expect work/life balance. You should have your weekends and vacation to recharge. When we have company holidays, we take them off.
- On-call that's reasonable; we have a formal rotation, and do deploys during work hours and even if you're on-call, you are rarely paged off hours.
- Tech debt is paid at constant intervals and all projects accounts for this time.
- Interviews and hiring based on culture fit, ranking higher than technical ability
- Performance reviews based on core values and behaviors and how you've grown
- Your responsibilities increase as you practice and embody these values.
- 1x1s are focused around you and how we can help you learn and grow and build up your behavioral muscles
- We will talk about the concepts until you're 😵, er.. I mean ❤️ing it 😂
- A week long New Hire Orientation to help you learn about Shippo
- It starts at the top - from our founders to senior leadership to individual contributors, we have a growth mindset and are humble enough to know we don't know everything.
- Feedback is ingrained - from 1x1s to 360 reviews to Reboot circles to celebrating our wins and coaching and mentoring all the time.
- We put our 💸 where our mouth is, we pay for you to learn and you have a yearly self improvement budget that we expect you to spend!
- Company wide OKRs are communicated broadly and time is spent to get them right. And if they aren't right, we throw them away.
- Aspirational OKRs are evaluated by our ability to hit 70% of the targets, and we conduct post mortems to figure out how to improve it next time
- Employee Resource Groups to help Shippos learn and grow
- This repo itself is a living document that can change and morph as we grow
- Our Hiring Process
- Effective 1x1s
- Core Behavior Details
- Behavior Antipatterns
- Our Reading Club