A month ago, I read "Team Geek" by my former Google co-workers Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. It's a book about how to code well with others, based on their extensive experience both in open-source (they invented SVN!) and their experience starting up the Google Chicago engineering office and leading teams there. I read it at the perfect time, because that was only a few weeks after I joined the half-year-old, 20-something-large Coursera team, just at the time that we were asking ourselves "How should we do X? Should we do Y? What's the best process for Z?"
One of the things that Ben and Fitz talk about is the "starter culture" of a team. For a baker, the most important part of making good bread is to start with a good, strong starter culture, because that culture will overcome any other cultures that come into the bread loaf later and produce a good loaf. They argue that the same can be said for teams — if the founding members of a team start with a strong starter culture, they will pass that on to new members and not be infected by "wild strains" of counter culture. The culture is a lot of things — a shared mission, engineering practices like coding conventions and code review processes, but also social traditions like happy hours or board game nights.
I'm enjoying being part of the first few team members of Coursera, because I have the opportunity to influence the starter culture now, while we're small, and hope that the culture continues as we grow larger. Besides establishing our engineering practices, here are a few company-wide traditions we've started:
Show & Tell
Remember this from kindergarten? Well, I thought it was awesome, so I've initiated a "Show & Tell" Mondays at Coursera.
We have a whiteboard in the hall where people can sign up with their name and their topic for an upcoming Monday, and then during lunchtime on Mondays, we give 5-15 minutes to each presenter. We're open to anything here — drafts of new features, interesting analytics, tutorials on using internal tools, or even ideas for future features — and it's not just for engineers, it's for everyone. We often get into great discussions after the show & tells about what we've seen, and these days, most everyone goes to them because they don't want to miss out.
It encourages a culture of openness and sharing, particularly across the boundaries of the engineering team. We want to feel like we're all in it together, and that everything we do is relevant to everyone else.
Tech Talks
Once a week, we invite a guest speaker to give a talk to us over lunch, and then we pick their brains to exhaustion after. We're fortunate enough to be working with very smart professors who we've brought in, like Kevin Werbach from the Gamification class that just started, and we're also lucky to work near to smart entrepreneurs, like Michael Staton from Inigral and Gunnar Counselman from Fidelis Education.
It's a great way to expose ourselves to outside opinions and challenge our own opinions, and it's particularly awesome now that we're so small and we can all personally chat with the speakers. We had very impressive guest speakers at Google, but it was rare that I got to actually have a personal conversation with them.
Formal Friday
Well, yeah, we're not the first ones to do this, but we make it look good.
My colleague Leith makes our Formal Fridays more interesting by bringing in a crazy cool raffle item every week, like an elephant-shaped mug or a laser-shooting duck, and sending off an email early in the morning, enticing us with how great our life will be if we were to own that item. The dressier we are, the more entries we get in the raffle, so that email will get us off our asses and into our bowties.
It also turns out to be a great excuse to take team photos once a week, like this one (which was a week I missed, unfortunately):
Games Lunch
As much as we love talking about what we're working on and how we can improve it, it can also be mentally exhausting. We like to give ourselves a break from that every so often with a quick board game, either over lunch or on a late night. We've stocked up on games that take less than an hour to play (or came up with rule variants that make it so), like Dominion, 7 wonders, and Poker. After a rousing game, we feel refreshed and sometimes even inspired. Our product designer Minjeong says she can't help but think about the user experience of playing the game, and how that transfers over to our product.
Those are some of the ways we're starting up our fun, open, and collaborative starter culture. Hopefully we can keep our culture strong as we grow in size. (And yes, we're hiring!) So, what do you do where you work?
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