In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke with Pooja Brown, VP of Engineering at Docusign about building great engineering culture.
Key Takeaways
- Great culture comes when people are aligned with the organisation’s mission
- There are ways to bring the voice of the customer to the ears of the team and doing so creates empathy and results in better products
- Transparency and openness around what matters to the company helps ensure people align with those goals
- Every engineer is responsible for ensuring that the code they write is reliable, available and secure
- Fairness and transparency are key to great culture
- Being a people manager requires technical knowledge for credibility but is not about providing technical leadership; many people confuse the two
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Ocado Technology: This podcast is brought to you by Ocado Technology, a division of the Ocado Group. Ocado Technology builds the software and systems powering Ocado.com, the world's largest online-only grocery retailer. We’ve been disrupting the grocery industry for over fifteen years using the cloud, robotics, AI, and IoT. Find out more and check out career opportunities here.
- 0:40 Introductions
- 1:32 Why digital signature technology matters
- 2:42 To have a great culture you need to be a part of the mission statement
- 3:32 The importance of truly being customer focused
- 3:48 An example of how Docusign are focusing on real customer experiences
- 4:46 How to open channels to enable engineers to really hear the voice of the customer
- 5:12 The “three-in-a-box” model that Docusign uses to ensure teams hear directly from their customers in order to build empathy and understanding
- 5:42 Ways in which Docusign ensures that the engineering teams hear from their customers
- 6:08 The closer you can get the person writing the code to the real customer problem the faster and more effectively the problem will be addressed
- 6:32 The importance of transparency around what matters to the company
- 6:57 Every engineer is responsible for ensuring that the code they write is reliable, available and secure
- 7:59 The value of providing a framework for career growth in an organisation
- 8:27 It’s important to build a fair culture where people understand why decisions are made, even if they don’t agree with them they can see how a decision was made
- 8:36 Make sure that people understand the expectations for each role and each level in the role across the whole organisation
- 8:52 This transparency, including salary transparency, removes fear from within and between teams
- 9:27 How Docusign give everyone a Global Impact Day in which people volunteer their time at the company’s expense for causes that matter to them
- 9:40 Pooja and some of her team going to the Glide Memorial Church to help out in a soup kitchen
- 10:48 Being clear about career progression structures that doesn’t confuse management and technical leadership
- 11:00 Being a people manager is a hard role to be successful at in a software company
- 11:12 Being a people manager requires technical knowledge for credibility but is not about providing technical leadership; many people confuse the two
- 12:25 The way Docusign supports people who move into a people management role
- 12:48 The best way to build technical leadership is through an apprentice model
- 13:03 Ways that Docusign provides guidance and support for people building their technical competencies
- 14:05 The experience of the Docusign team at QCon
- 16:03 The number of women leaders on the Docusign team
- 16:15 Approaches to actively promote and help build women’s careers
- 16:31 Writing job descriptions so they are truly gender neutral
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