In business 9 years
Funding modelBootstrapped
Team size 7

Discoverize

discoverize is a small, remote team of 7 developing our own product – a white-label business portal software. We provide complex and customizable solutions to our customers. As our company grows, we are looking to also grow our dev team.

Discoverize profile

How do you maintain flexibility & balance for your team?

We practice sociocracy - which means that want every voice to be heard so that we can build a better team culture and also be more happy as individuals. We have established a "team happiness" that is only concerned about how to improve each team member's overall satisfaction with life and work.

We have team check-ins every day that are not focused on work but on our private lives, what everybody is up to and how we are doing.

Everybody is free to work as much or as little as they like, take time off for personal matters, even work from Thailand or any place you like. We also encourage to learn new topics away from work like sports, languages whatever you are interested that helps you feel balanced in life.

And you can take a daily nap or meditation which we pay for :)

On average we work between 30-35h per week.

How do you ensure autonomy and plan for the future?

We have a big team that everybody is a part of where we tackle all questions around our culture, company and product. Anyone can raise concerns or give feedback on issues.

From there smaller teams (devs, design, support, marketing, sales, team happiness) take care of their individual work and report back every 2 weeks to the big team. Within each team every person is in charge of their own work, however we do regular pair programming, design review, etc.

We also use OKRs for planning long-term and having clear goals. The objectives come straight from our mission and vision, which is open for everybody's input and discussed regularly.
Every Monday we also do a feedback session on what went well and what we would like to improve.
One-on-one feedback sessions with detailed feedback are also part of our setup.
Agile 2-week sprints are also part of our DNA, so that features and work gets pushed out into the wild quickly and feedback from our clients and users is received on a regular basis do call to catch up and stay connected, but we try to keep meetings and calls to an absolute minimum.

How does your company try to hire people from underrepresented groups and improve the diversity of your team?

We are a small team coming from different backgrounds and countries. However, we know we still can improve our team's diversity and we are taking active steps in our hiring process to build an inclusive team. Our primary goal is to look for people who are a good fit but also challenge our preconceptions, traditions, and ways of doing things. We are very much open for growth and change, since this keeps us moving — which we all enjoy.

How do you support your team to grow and improve?

We use OKRs which are based on ambitious stretch goals. Since everyone has a say in what we work on and how we work there are few obstacles to be motivated. Also, there are personal OKRs that don't only have to relate to work.

Being a small team also helps - everybody knows each other closely and everyone enjoys helping each other out. We do funky weeks (usually in person, but currently due to covid-19 remotely) where everybody is free to explore new topics that don't have to be related to our product or software products in general. After every sprint, we also have half a day off regular work to clean up, review the sprint and finish open topics of personal interest.

Everybody is invited to participate in workshops, conferences, buy and read books or learn new skills - all paid for (we encourage you to spend 10% of your work time on this). Also, we do small team talks - where one person presents a topic of their personal interest for about 20min - TED talks style.