I’d been on the sidelines of BARK since its first year, occasionally consulting or advising. I even helped to pack the boxes in the conference room back when the shipping could be handled by a handful of people in a weekend. It’s been amazing to see it grow from that small, scrappy operation to today’s large but still scrappy operation, shipping millions of items every month.
Yet, we still serve only a small fraction of dogs in the world, so opportunities abound, which is partly what drew me to join BARK as CTO seven years into its journey. The biggest factors, though, were the people at BARK and the way they worked together. Soon after I joined, we put in writing the core components of the work culture that we aspire to as a technical team. They follow in bold…
Dogs are our customers, we aim to make them happy.
Treat them as we would want ourselves and our dogs treated.
This is of course a BARK-wide tenet, guiding our product development, our branding, and even our photography. We as a tech team want to keep it top-of-mind as well. Also, dog people tend to be people people, distinguished by kindness and a tolerance for fart jokes. (Many of us are still engineers, so, you know… we have our limits).
Don’t assign blame, solve problems.
One thing you notice quickly when you’re here is that when things go wrong, people immediately jumping to their keyboard to figure out what went wrong, why, and how they can fix it — not who caused it. As a result the person/people involved take responsibility and openly share their mistakes and learnings.
No dogma about “the right way” to do things.
- Code is a means to an end, don’t be too precious with it.
- Testing is a means to an end, don’t be too precious about it.
- Take our work seriously, not ourselves. No blowhards.
These are so important. We’ve all worked with those who preach about the “right” way to do things, and who value coding style over getting stuff done, providing a good user experience, and having performant software. We try to strike a balance. A strong point of view is perfectly fine; flexibility is key. We’ve found the best technologists often appreciate the simplest solutions and are mindful not to over-engineer.
If you think someone should do something, you’re that someone!
We have some of the early start-up scrap left in us, so we tend to wear many hats. Responsibility starts with the person in the mirror!
Everybody values their time and everyone else’s
We want to get the most effect, business impact, scalability as we can for our time. And we don’t want to make our teammates spin their wheels. We evaluate everything by its bang for buck, and appreciate simple solutions that are easy to read and follow.
Everybody cares about the user experience
We all want our customers and their humans to have a good experience, on our app or in the real world with their toys, treats, dental chews… even our poop bags. We don’t just code to specs handed to us, we try to think holistically and have empathy with the customers.
Scrappy, fail fast. Test and measure, test and measure
Be data driven
When data is available, we use it. When it’s not, we figure out how to get it. Most everything user-facing that we launch gets rolled out to a test audience first, to make sure we are in fact improving the user experience and the business as we evolve.
In addition to the values above, there are other elements of our culture and identity that matter to us, and help keep things creative and fun. We have semi-annual retreats upstate for hackathons. There are fairly regular karaoke nights and other team-building activities for our team or the entire company. We also have weekly “awkward” meetings, where we each answer a question of the day and accept any awkward pauses.
We organize ourselves according to our principles. Cross-functional squads have measurable goals and the autonomy to reach them. Our processes are flexible and open to revision.
But, the points listed above are what really define how we work day-to-day, how we respond to issues that arise, and how we approach new opportunities. We hope these values keep us grounded and our culture unique, as we still have a long way to go on our mission to make every dog in the world happy.
