Engineering Key Values

Earlier this year, I first came across the site KeyValues.com. I was really impressed with the site’s unique approach to filtering potential companies for a next role. When you read a company careers page or their job descriptions it can can be very difficult (read: impossible) to find out what their team values really are – e.g. do they support a good work/life balance, do they keep meetings to a minimum? As both an Engineer and as an Engineering leader I am a big fan of the concept behind KeyValues – that Engineers should be able to discover and learn about the teams they’d be joining before committing to a time-consuming (and sometimes soul-sucking) interview process.

I am delighted to share that Plastiq now has its own profile at https://www.keyvalues.com/plastiq! Working through the process with Lynne Tye (who was recently featured in Forbes) was very educational for me – she challenged me to consider what are the key values that our engineering team lives and breathes. I discovered the best way to determine what those key values were was to ask my team! So I sent out a survey to all members of the Engineering team in late November, asking them to give me two pieces of information:

• 1. What do you consider the key values that Plastiq Engineering represents? (selecting from the list of Key Values that Lynne defined on KeyValues.com)
• 2. How does working at Plastiq compares to your previous work experience(s)? (free-form text answer)

For the first question, the values that the team selected are what made it onto our KeyValues profile. “Continuous Delivery” had the most votes, with “Start-to-Finish Ownership” and “Team is Diverse” following closely behind.

For the second question, I got some really great quotes from the team, much of which made its way indirectly on the KeyValues profile in the various sections. However I wanted to share some of the answers from the team directly, unfiltered as they really resonated with me and hopefully will with you also:

• – “We can move really fast and really place no limits on how we can work as a team.“
• – “A big difference that has kept me engaged at Plastiq (and kept me from seeking jobs elsewhere) is the ability to move internally to new projects and technologies that interest me. Leadership has been extremely open to team members taking on new tasks, and trusting them to learn as they go if they aren’t subject matter experts in those new areas.“
• – “Faster paced, more ownership of work by developers, less formal QA, almost immediate promotion of code to production, more freedom to drive what I work on.“
• – “I feel that I am part of the company, my opinion is considered. We don’t talk about diversity, here we live/feel diversity.“