How we built a fully remote, self-organizing company before it was cool
Blog Series about how we run SoftwareMill
This year we’re happily celebrating 10 years of SoftwareMill! During this time we pursued one of the most innovative approaches to structure, management, and organization.
We’re starting this Blog Post Series to share insights from our story, how we evolved and how we work today.
We’ll cover the following topics:
- The story of SoftwareMill: How we built a fully remote, self-organizing company.
- How decisions are made at a 40+ CEO’s company.
- How We Communicate as a Fully Remote Team — our approach, tools and best practices.
- Culture of a remote company. Guide for taking care of your team.
We’re excited to share our story with you, so let’s dive in!
A lot of people are asking us about tips on remote work. Need a helping hand and advice on transitioning a business to a remote model?
Watch a video from an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with our CEO Tomasz Szymański and get lessons learned from our 10-years journey of building a 100% remote team.
How we built a fully remote business
Distributed Team from Day One
How come a small software development and consultancy agency from Europe became fully remote, transparent and self-organizing before top startups like Buffer, Zappos and Zapier did? If you’re not familiar with their stories, you can read about them in a great post by Adam Henshall from Process.St.
At SoftwareMill we’ve been completely remote since the very beginning in 2009. We’ve never had any physical office location. When the company was founded, remote work was something the co-founders were already familiar with while working in this model for their current employer. They considered a variety of company success factors and assumed that instead of focusing on finding a physical office location, the more beneficial is to hire amazing people with great communication skills.
Naturally, the next question was: How to make remote work for everyone?How to run a completely remote company so that it can grow and remain successful? Four rules were adopted that played a big part in the equation:
1. Everyone works remotely
The founders assumed that if everyone works remotely there must be the same communication channels for everyone. Having a physical location even for a few employees would create sub-groups and wouldn’t work in the long-term. The problem was well defined by Bob McWhirter in his post Remote Worker, Distributed Team. That’s why the first step was creating habits and best practices that supported everyone’s remote work. One example of such best practices are our daily Chrum meetings.
2. Great tools for communication
These were carefully chosen and tested. The assumption was that it’s worth investing in great tools that should enable both synchronous and asynchronous communication. The company developed their own toolstack with specific meeting formats as well as best practices for using particular tools like TeamSpeak for example.
3. Hiring people with professional experience
To be honest, we haven’t figured out yet how to introduce juniors to remote work. That’s why we prefer to hire senior people as it’s much easier to master remote work when you already have some professional experience.
4. Meeting face to face on a regular basis
Once a month we meet for a company retreat called Birr (the original name was SoftwareBirr as an analogy to SoftwareMill ;)). First and foremost, its goal is to spend quality time together — we travel to a particular city, go out for a dinner or party. Apart from that, we use this time to work together. We discuss and make company-wide decisions, run retrospectives and workshops where we learn from each other.
Transparent and self-organized
This is the part where we describe in details how did it happen that we opened our books, everyone learned about everyone else’s salary and the founders decided to share their power and let the company self-organize. Kind of nuts? “Here is to the crazy ones. (…)”
It all started at the beginning of 2013 when the founders were piled upon the challenges of a growing company. They still loved programming and didn’t want to resign from that, while a 20+ company demanded more and more of their attention. Actually, a similar story happened at Zapier and their CTO described it in his CTO journey of a small startup.
Inspiration came quite unexpected from two companies from very different industries. Both of them introduced full transparency and self-management. The first one was the game maker Valve and the second one was the US largest tomato processors — Morning Star.
With these examples in mind, the Board decided to extend the self-organizing principle from the project teams to the whole company. The idea was to support a bottom-up structure, where “everyone is a CEO” — meaning everyone is encouraged to make decisions.
The first step to make it possible was introducing full transparency. It was necessary to provide the whole team with all information needed to decide about just anything: can I buy an iPad for a project? Should I go visit my client? Are we investing in our own product? Opening books and coming up with salaries formula was a big step in this process.
Secondly, we came up with company-wide processes for sales and hiring where anyone can contribute, but responsibilities are clear.
Now, imagine a 20+ team deciding on just anything — should we hire this person? Are we changing the pricing? Where do we go for a birr (retreat)? It sounds like a nightmare and we can’t deny it.
On one hand, people were afraid to make decisions on their own and stuck to safe options. On the other hand, there was lots of giving good advice which resulted in micromanagement. Lots of discussions and frustrated emojis on Skype (at that time) had to be sent until we made it. We developed guidelines and formats for making different kinds of decisions. That helped us with streamlining everyone’s focus and keeping the decision-making process simple. If you would be interested in exploring the topic further, here’s a youtube video of our CEO, Tomasz Szymański, giving a talk on how our company operates, as well as sharing some problems that we’ve encountered along the way.
As for marketing, we have a dedicated team that’s responsible for this area, but the whole company is engaged in creating and distributing content. Want to know more about our marketing strategies? Read this article and find out.
The next milestones in the evolution of the company included:
- Developing our own financial system for monitoring the companies financial situation, making forecasts and informed decisions
- Introducing retrospectives to keep improving the organization
- Focusing on learning and development by creating R&D department, book clubs and Friday Market
We’re now a 40+ CEOs company and we’re growing. But can you call it a success?
“For us, success means that we’re a team of friends who differ but all value trust and self-development. We developed something unique — a culture that builds upon remote work, transparency, and self-organisation. We’re proud of how we developed it over the last 10 years and how it works now.”
To sum up, there were four most important aspects that ultimately shaped SoftwareMill and its innovative approach to organization:
- High emphasis on creating a company culture which is beneficial for both employees and customers alike
- Building on the traditional engineering work ethics and agile development
- The use of technology that enables to centralize elements of communication and organization
- Combating common problems growing companies face
Fun fact — Fredric Laloux published Reinventing organizations in 2014. In his book, he coined a term “teal organization”, which SoftwareMill became already a year before.
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The future
Who knows what the future beholds when it comes to our structure?
“Our goal is growing the company and developing own products. That’s why we’ll be growing the team twice in the coming years while sticking to our mission which is: being the best remote workplace for engineers. We’ll be hiring top engineers who want to work on Blockchain and AI projects.”
We might be adjusting the organizational structure in the coming years, but one thing is for sure — it will be done through a bottom-up process.
Check out our careers page if you wish to become a CEO at SoftwareMill.
Now, over to you. If you’re thinking about trying out Scala you might want to send your CV to us. Let’s meet and talk :) We love spreading our Scala know-how and so SoftwareMill is probably the best place in the world to get started.
For us remote business is business as usual. Custom software agency with 10+ years of experience as a remote-first company. Hire our engineers and strengthen your big data team 🚀
