“We want every person in the team to act like a mini CEO,” said Sylvain Utard, VP of Engineering at Algolia. 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. 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.
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. 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 half a decade, the company went from 3 people to having 70 members on the dev team alone. Algolia set roots in Paris and has since crossed the pond, establishing offices in London, San Francisco, New York, and Atlanta. The company was forced to make major structural and organizational changes to keep up with the expansion.
Creating "Squads" To Build Ownership And Maintaining Productivity
Algolia had the same beginning as a lot of startups - a very flat organization with no real structure nor process. There was only one goal - to move fast. “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.
When the team grew to 20 members, the problem started becoming painfully evident when someone wanted to try something new. 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.
Having an efficient decision making process, Sylvain and the team realized, was the key to moving things forward in a scaling company. This prompted them to create squads two years ago. 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.
Each squad has ownership of a subscope of the larger company scope. With two to eight people in a squad, the squad leader has the responsibility to ensure the squad meets their goals. 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.
Creating 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. “Everyone has an impact,” Sylvain explained, as he elaborated on how ownership is heavily laced through Algolia’s company culture. Every member, onsite and remote alike, is expected to take ownership from day one. By cultivating a culture of ownership, each team member is aware of their impact and contribution to the larger company vision.
The Importance of Transparency
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. This is critical for team members as everyone is expected to take ownership. 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.
At Algolia, transparency is more than a buzzword, it’s the undertone of the company culture. 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.
This isn’t a trait that’s exclusive to Algolia. Companies like Hubspot, are also practicing transparency. 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. When leaders are transparent, problems are solved faster. After all, two heads are better than one.
Hiring and Interviewing Process: It All Starts From Day 0
One of the most important key factors to maintaining a company culture of ownership and transparency while building a quickly moving, highly technical product is having a skilled, motivated, and problem solving team.
In order to build the best team, Algolia takes their interviewing and hiring process very seriously. There are usually 2-3 screening calls before the candidate moves onto a technical assignment. While most companies have onsite interviews that take a couple of hours, Algolia invites candidates onsite for a day, to meet with the squads and other people in the company.
Hiring teams work closely with developers and squads during the hiring process, from understanding the requirements of the position that needs to be filled to arranging for the interview. It doesn’t just stop there. Every single potential interviewer needs to complete a training course before they are able to interview candidates. In order to hire for technical skills and culture fit, one of the main focal points during the training course is how to eliminate unconscious bias. “Everyone is biased,” Sylvain said, but the important part is that each interviewer can overcome and see beyond said bias.
Building A Sense Of Ownership In Remote Teams
Starting last year, Algolia started building their remote team across the pond, tapping into the talent pool in London, New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta. As they are still learning how to embrace remote teams, Sylvain explains most of the remote team members are senior developers that have previously worked with Algolia, so they had a rough idea of how the company works before joining.
Even so, all remote developers are required to be onsite at the Paris office for the first couple of weeks. By being physically onsite, it is easier for the team to bond with the new member and vice versa. New team members are also able to have a better understanding of how the company, or more specifically, “even now there is no strict way of working, each squad has their own different way of doing things.” Members also learn how to collect and give feedback and how to make decisions.
Additionally, every developer that’s based in the Paris office are encouraged to go to one of the offices in the US (usually San Francisco, but there’s a growing team in New York City) approximately once a year to meet vis-a-vis with the remote team. “It’s easy to forget about remote members,” Sylvain said, echoing many people’s concerns about establishing a remote team. Bringing remote developers onsite and having Paris developers visit other offices is only one of the ways Algolia exercises to ensure remote team members feel like they’re also part of Algolia’s team.
While every meeting is summarised and the decisions made in the meeting are highlighted, this is especially important for squads with remote members, as not every remote member might be able to attend meetings due to time differences.
Slack has been hailed as THE communication tool for startups, but Sylvain stressed that teams “should not overestimate the productivity of Slack.” While it is an awesome tool to collaborate, it can still present as a handicap when members are in different time zones. “You wake up and the first thing you see is dozens of chat notifications to catch up on,” Sylvain said when explaining the inconvenience caused by this convenient messaging tool.
“We also have a “How To Slack” document,” Sylvain brought up when telling us how Slack might affect productivity. Common practices, such as using @here, is a no-no at Algolia because “most times, the message doesn’t need to be @here. If it’s so important, send an email.”
Seemingly going against the disruptive nature of startups, Algolia actually promotes the use of emails, even internally. Decisions made, important announcements, and collaboration efforts are all communicated and documented in emails.
Algolia’s slack channels are also named according to certain naming conventions. Looking for help on a certain project? Try #help-[project name]. Or if you need to locate a team or project, try #team-[team name]. By categorising slack channels, team members are able to quickly identify where questions or discussions should go.
“We want as much transparency as possible,” Sylvain said, “We want everyone to understand why we are doing what we’re doing and why a decision was taken.” By giving all team members access to company information, it builds the culture of transparency, trust, and ownership.
Advice For Startups Who Want To Go Remote
Before we ended our chat with Sylvain, we asked him what advice he would share about embracing remote development teams. “Don’t start developing remote teams too quickly or do it day 1,” he said. It took Algolia a couple of years before they decided to embrace remote development teams last year.
It’s important to train each team member and squad to have ownership. By training and allowing each individual and squad to take ownership over their scope, decisions are made more effectively and efficiently. This also minimises cross-team tangles, further detangling the decision making process. Other startups like Buffer or Zapier have also shared their secret sauce on how to build a remote team culture from the ground up.
Through their experience, Sylvain also suggested that teams build procedures first - be it for information sharing, making decisions, trying experiments - before incorporating remote team members. It’s easy to forget about remote team members, so you have to “make sure that you know how and are able to work with someone that is not onsite.” This starts from knowing what the core of your company culture is and assessing if candidates have this trait during the interview process, even before they join the team. Once they join the team, an extra step must be taken to keep remote members in the loop and feel part of the team.
Building a remote team and making it work more often than not, seems like hard work and an extra task, but for Algolia, the company’s culture of ownership and transparency concreted the foundation for building the remote teams.
