Engineering Culture
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Each team at Metry might have different responsibilities, slight differences in the way they work, but they share the same vision and commonalities when it comes to culture. This document is aiming to capture these shared cultural commonalities and shared cultural values. Culture is an ever-changing concept, and what's written here is not written in stone, we will always seek opportunities to improve and nurture our culture.
Team spirit is everything
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
A cliche but a very accurate one. The last ten years in software development have proven that software systems have become so distributed and complex that as an individual your impact on software is limited. Building, developing and selling products is quite a long journey. We set sail a long while ago and we want to take the distance. To take the distance we need to be collaborating effectively and closely – whether we work with development, sales, customer service or in any other team.
All the synergies of working in a team setting produce great collaboration, great strength, resilience, flexibility and innovation. Together as a team, we learn from each other, we create an environment where ideas can be discussed freely to move Metry and ourselves forward.
We build things that we are proud of
Call it green-tech or prop-tech, we help our customers to reduce their energy consumption. Our products have a positive impact on our planet and climate. 🌱
What we build is what we are, so we want to be proud of it. Building software is hard! Our products are the showcase of intricate and detailed cognitive work of many years. We deal with an outstanding detail level every day. Building products require analytical thinking, creativity, empathy, and many other skills. After all the work is done and when it reaches the user, that's the moment to shine, this is the time the actual value is delivered. It’s one of the most critical aspects of software engineering that we always build things that we are proud of to feel the accomplishment and to deliver the greatest value for our users.
What we build is what we own as well, we have the ownership of the cognitive imprint of all that hard labor, it’s alive and it requires our continuous attention.
We trust each other... a lot!
At first sight, you might think that "trust" is a vector of team spirit by default and you are not wrong. However, trust deserves a great emphasis when it comes to software engineering and it's quite linked to psychological safety. Trust creates an atmosphere of safety where we can all thrive together. Knowing that there will always be colleagues you can rely on when you are stuck, hopeless or clueless; gives you the freedom to experiment, innovate, take risks at the very correct moment. Trust and psychological safety are crucial components of successful software engineering, it becomes even more crucial when you are solving complex and hard problems.
We are iterative
Building products is a never-ending journey. In some cases, the route to our destination deviates so we need to be strategic for reaching our destination. We go step by step but quickly. Each step gives us the chance to take different risks at different levels. Innovation is not possible when taking risks is not in place, without innovation the amount of value delivered declines significantly. Since our steps are small, failure is not something that we are afraid of, they don’t deviate us from our route. We learn from the last mistake, we move on to the next step, never to make the same mistake again and to build something better than before.
Being iterative is not only for minimising the impact of errors and mistakes but it helps us to deliver continuous value to our users. Teams that deliver in shorter cycles will get the feel of accomplishment more often, will take more initiatives to be autonomous in their decision making processes and engineering practices which will only make them a happier team than before.