At The Data City, we’ve always believed in the power of a strong, shared foundation to guide our team towards success.
This comes from our three founders each having led and worked in very different organisations and wanting to create a different type of company in The Data City – one that challenged and engaged the team working for it – whilst also offering the utmost flexibility and understanding for the individuals who work here.
It meant that we always had a hybrid, flexible working policy- well before covid made this the norm. As well as hiring the best people in a way that worked for them (part-time, contract, remote etc.)
From Vision to action
Over time, our core beliefs and practices have naturally evolved into a set of values that reflect who we are and how we work. Sometimes new starters find our way of working so different as they are used to sign off processes and lots of red tape holding them back from decision making and removing their autonomy.
That’s why we’ve taken a deliberate step to formalise these values and the behaviours that embody them, ensuring that everyone in our organisation understands and can align with these guiding principles.
This will help us maintain a consistent culture as we grow and navigate new challenges.
Let’s dive into our six core values and the behaviours that bring them to life.
Values
1. Own it, share it, perfect it
We recruit people that we trust to do the job better than we can ourselves.
We don’t tell them how to do it. We give them the freedom, support and tools to go all-in on delivering work of the highest quality, while being transparent and accountable.
2. We keep our friends close
We developed our product in collaboration with our communities. This approach is one of the secrets of our success. It’s how we’ve added great features and built what our users want, while moving us towards our mission.
Constant dialogue keeps our standards high and focuses us on the deliverables – working at pace, iterating fast and making it better with every update.
3. Our job is not done until the job is done
We all take responsibility for the overall piece of work, not just our individual elements.
We never stop thinking about what else we can do to ensure the work meets the agreed definition of done.
4. We set our own pace and it’s fast
Pace means working decisively with clarity and diligence and sharing a first version as quickly as possible.
Think: How can I improve it? How can we deliver it? Would spending more time on something bring bigger reward or negative consequences?
5. Success is not an individual sport
Our success is far from assured.
When things go wrong – and they do, we’re human and we’re doing something ambitious and hard to achieve – we don’t blame each other. We learn, we improve, and we move forward together.
And when we win, we celebrate as one, knowing that it’s taken a team to make it happen.
6. We seek out the wonder in the world
We’re fascinated by the world around us.
We care about what others are doing well and how we can learn from them. And we’re curious about innovation and admire our competition.
We know that ideas come from everywhere. By engaging in the world around us we’re constantly inspired to improve.
Once we understood and documented our Values, we shared them with team members who helped us shape how we wrote them; the order, vocabulary and nuances with each, then we considered the behaviours these encourage or that we already practice and how we formalise these to give our team a quick reference point and shared language to ensure we all live these, and, importantly, can easily hold each other to account if we are not.
These are a little more detailed, reiterating the qualities we share, the way we work and, in some cases showing examples.
Be more Hemmingway
Hemmingway is famous for simplifying his writing, ruthlessly reviewing his work and removing any unnecessary words. He understood the power of brevity and so do we.
Our team is the best of the best, but we don’t need them to overcomplicate things to sound impressive. There’s strength in simplicity.
Our people regularly share what they’re working on and are encouraged to explain even the most complex of issues in the clearest of ways. This is essential to our success.
Through this sharing and the positive questioning of others, clear ‘breakthrough’ solutions often appear. Again, clarity is essential for this.
Embrace the awkward questions
We’re stronger as a team. Each of us brings our own perspective and skillset to the table, and together we make the deliverables better. We’re not competitive in the traditional win/lose sense, but we are in how we set the bar high and inspire each other to push it ever upwards.
When a member of the team shares what they’re working on, being asked “Why?” is seen as a great response. “What does great look like?” is a question we ask ourselves every day, for each task, for each idea, for each meeting.
“How can it be better?” and “Who else can improve this?”. These questions are about positively challenging. The person being asked trusts that the person asking is doing so to make the result better. It’s a way of ensuring we’re all clear in what we want to achieve.
Equally, the team trust each other enough not to challenge for the sake of it. When something makes sense to all, we celebrate it and consider how we can help to make it better still.
We’re not prescriptive with processes or sign offs on everything. We prefer to give autonomy to the team in the work they do. Through our culture of asking these kinds of questions, of not being afraid to be challenged, we give our team the tools they need to develop and grow.
Do the right things at the right times
Our team has great instincts. They know when they need to share what they’re working on, to actively collaborate and invite opinions on how to make it better. Our team understand that success often comes from involving the different areas of the business and is essential to creating a fully rounded solution.
But they also know when they need to get their head down and focus on their part of the bigger picture.
All of this stems from a shared appreciation of what great looks like. If a piece of work is better than anything before it – whether created by us or others – we put it live (and share that it’s in beta) so we can invite feedback and improve. This is how we set our pace.
Of course, doing the right thing requires everyone to understand when something is not right. When that’s the case, our team are empowered to call it out, to say ‘no’, and to find a better way.
View exceptional quality as the minimum requirement
Success is a funny thing. The more we enjoy it, the more vital our work becomes, the higher the expectation levels, the bigger the contracts and the decisions made by our data become more important.
Success brings risk and responsibility, and the way we navigate that is through a constant, relentless dedication to quality.
We’re proud of our work.
Never take your eye off the prize
The Data City is in a scale-up phase. It’s easy to think that we’ve made it, that those days of being a scrappy start-up are behind us. But the truth is that the most important problems we’ll ever face are ahead. And during your time here you may help us solve them.
Alongside the ‘unknown, unknowns’ there are aspects of our product to constantly refine as we access more quality data, develop new ways of Quality Assuring our data, and improve the experience for our users.
As part of this, we will sometimes work on projects for our clients that help our clients, but don’t move our product forward, these projects are also essential for our success – they further build our relationships, and the financial reward means we can develop our product more.
Remember: Commerciality brings us freedom
Remember, curiosity didn’t kill anything… quite the opposite
We’re fascinated by the world around us. We keep our finger on the pulse of the latest economic trends, and we study what makes others win and what great looks like in different sectors.
We care about what others are doing well and how we can learn from them. And we’re curious about innovation and admire our competition.
We know that ideas and inspiration live around every corner, so we never stop looking.
Every piece of work needs an owner
When we decide to do something, we decide who will own it, this doesn’t mean the ‘Project manage’ it, or that they are the one to build it, it simply means they will ensure to understand what done looks like and will work with the team to ensure we live our values until we have delivered it.
So, what does all this mean?
Firstly it means that we can continue giving our team full autonomy as they know the boundaries that they work in (this also comes through using OKRs as our goal setting framework, which aligns everyone in the company to the company goals, each other’s and our own objectives in achieving these goals) and also gives them a vocabulary to be able to discuss these with anyone in the team- in any position within the company.
For new starters; they understand what we want and expect- both from them and each other- this makes recruiting and onboarding so much easier.
We have a simple framework within which we can operate -taking the guess work out of work- meaning everyone can focus on what they are best at!
Increased satisfaction – we complete every job we start (our jobs not done until the job is done!) which makes for high levels of satisfaction and a real sense of achievement when you are part of adding a new feature to the product or new operating system.
As an innovative company we are always adapting and improving- each time we do something slightly better, we share it and learn from it making improvements everywhere.
The 1%’s quickly add up!