![]() Hiring and Interviewing Process: It All Starts From Day 0 After all, two heads are better than one. When leaders are transparent, problems are solved faster. From financial reports to board meeting decks, Hubspot believes that by sharing this information, employees are able to stay informed and aligned with the company vision. ![]() Companies like Hubspot, are also practicing transparency. This isn’t a trait that’s exclusive to Algolia. By sharing the problems and directions the company is going, team members are able to understand their role in the overarching company vision, cultivating a sense of trust between leadership and team members. Not only does this level of transparency allow squads and team members to adjust their project or scope accordingly, team members are also more engaged with company operations.Īt Algolia, transparency is more than a buzzword, it’s the undertone of the company culture. This is critical for team members as everyone is expected to take ownership. While changes are made to “empower the squads,” Sylvain reminded us that it is still “key is to explain why these changes are made.” By explaining the struggles the company is facing and why these changes are being made, squads and team members are able to be aware of the problems and changes the company is facing. By cultivating a culture of ownership, each team member is aware of their impact and contribution to the larger company vision. Every member, onsite and remote alike, is expected to take ownership from day one. “Everyone has an impact,” Sylvain explained, as he elaborated on how ownership is heavily laced through Algolia’s company culture. ![]() By creating squads, the decision-making process was no longer scattered across the company as each squad is essentially its own ecosystem where all decisions pertinent to the subscope are made within.Ĭreating squads was less about changing the way the developers coded, Sylvain told us, and “more about maintaining productivity and efficiency.” This reason highlighted the essence of Algolia’s company culture: for every person in the company to take initiatives and make decisions. With two to eight people in a squad, the squad leader has the responsibility to ensure the squad meets their goals. Being a highly technical company, Algolia started off with engineering squads, composed purely of developers, before the addition of product managers and designers evolved the teams to product development squads.Įach squad has ownership of a subscope of the larger company scope. This prompted them to create squads two years ago. Having an efficient decision making process, Sylvain and the team realized, was the key to moving things forward in a scaling company. Did anyone need to sign off on the decision? Was there an SOP for creating a new experiment? Confusion soon became the undertone of decisions and experiments. When the team grew to 20 members, the problem started becoming painfully evident when someone wanted to try something new. “There was no strong process,” recalled Sylvain, “We just needed to go fast and try to do things.” And it worked.until the company started to scale. Creating "Squads" To Build Ownership And Maintaining ProductivityĪlgolia had the same beginning as a lot of startups - a very flat organization with no real structure nor process. The company was forced to make major structural and organizational changes to keep up with the expansion. Algolia set roots in Paris and has since crossed the pond, establishing offices in London, San Francisco, New York, and Atlanta. ![]() In half a decade, the company went from 3 people to having 70 members on the dev team alone. He also talked to us about scaling engineering teams and working with distributed teams, including how to maintain productivity, company culture, and incorporating remote team members. In an exclusive interview with Codementor, Sylvain chatted with us about how Algolia’s culture of ownership and transparency have been the backbone of the company’s impressive growth in the past half decade. With big-name clients such as Stripe, Medium, and Twitch, Algolia performs over 41 billion search requests a month, and it seems like their growth isn’t slowing down any time soon. ![]() Being the first employee to join Algolia almost five years ago, Sylvain has seen most, if not all, the changes the Y-Combinator-backed web search platform startup went through. “We want every person in the team to act like a mini CEO,” said Sylvain Utard, VP of Engineering at Algolia. ![]()
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