Our Engineering Principles

We'd like to give you a bit of a glimpse into our engineering ways of working. Below are our engineering principles that we aspire to live by. They tend to change over time (they have even changes slightly this week) and we'll do our best to keep them here up to date. 

Our core principle is people over process. We believe that great teams can achieve amazing results if they are given the autonomy and support they need. With this approach, we are a more nimble, inspiring, creative, collaborative, joyful, and successful organization. 
And here are our other principles: 

• Context over control - Our engineers are decision-makers. We see our leaders’ job to communicate clear context. Thanks to this we are confident that everyone can make the best decisions based on the information they have. 
  
• Autonomy and responsibility -  We trust that our employees will take care of the needs of our customers, their colleagues, and our business. We believe in the boy/girl-scout rule – always leave code better than you found it. And we extend this rule to every part of our organisation - we take the responsibility to do the right thing. We aspire to inspire people more than manage them. 
  
• Quick feedback loops are a backbone of learning – We are a learning organisation, we learn in every moment. We call out our assumptions and validate them rapidly. We use automation to give us quick feedback (and confidence) about the code we create. 
  
• Highly aligned and loosely coupled teams - We believe in teams that are able to make decisions fast, and this requires having highly aligned teams’ members. This also requires teams that can collaborate but which are not blocking each other. This way we all can move forward, learn and solve problems at speed. 
  
• You build it you run it - We want to build our solutions with high confidence and pride. We expect our engineers to build solutions that they deploy and support in production. We believe that this greatly increases the quality of services we offer our customers and our colleagues. 
  
• Releasing software should be a business decision - We believe that, at every moment, we should be confident about the quality of our code. And as soon as a new code is ready, we deploy it to production. And when our users are ready to use the new code, we make it available for them. This allows us to shorten the feedback loops, and better understand our customers. 
  
• Learning over knowing - while we are good at what we do, we also acknowledge that no one has all the answers. We ask questions, a lot of them. We do our research, spikes, and experiments when we don’t have answers. We celebrate not knowing as it gives us the ability to learn something new.
  
• Continuous improvements - We wouldn't be a learning organisation if we didn’t take continuous improvement seriously. We know we are not perfect but it does not stop us from seeking excellence in everything we do. Every person who joins us helps to shape and evolve the culture and solutions further. When something goes wrong, we take it as a blameless learning opportunity and improve.
  
• Better together - No one can deny the power of teamwork. We strongly believe we are “Better together” and together we can achieve the impossible. We don’t believe in lone wolves and superheroes who always save the day. Thus for us, teamwork means that people cooperate and contribute, using their individual skills and supporting each other.