 by Edward Ocampo-Gooding (@ Shopify) inspired a list of suggested questions for interview candidates looking for their next web dev employer. Shortly after, this list inspired a popular blog post, 

. Questions I'm asking in interviews open sources an extensive list of questions covering topics such as engineering practices, management's style and company culture, drawn from many others in the tech space sharing questions that are important to them throughout their interview process.

At Aptible, we care about hiring the best team members and thus we strongly encourage and make time for Q&A in each step of our hiring process. Moreover, we’re committed to transparency and open sourcing of our culture and hiring process. Below you’ll find our responses to the questions in Julia Evan's blog post - something we'd like to title: 

Looking for your next engineering role? In 2013, a blog post by Edward Ocampo-Gooding (@ Shopify) inspired a list of suggested questions for interview candidates looking for their next web dev employer. Shortly after, this list inspired a popular blog post, Questions I'm asking in interviews by Julia Evans. Questions I'm asking in interviews open sources an extensive list of questions covering topics such as engineering practices, management's style and company culture, drawn from many others in the tech space sharing questions that are important to them throughout their interview process.

Questions You’re Asking in Interviews

Hear about the experiences of Aptible team members across four different teams - finance, customer success, support, and engineering. This deep dive interview was conducted with the help of our friend, 

, who helped us bring out the objective stories and perspectives of each team member. Read on!

Let’s start off with some icebreakers to help everyone get to know you better. Nowadays, since we’re always so surrounded by media content in all forms, share with us your favorite book, podcast, etc. that you’d recommend.

InterviewBlock

These are great! And of course, we’ll have to start off with introductions to our audiences by describing your role at Aptible. What do you work on, and do you wear many hats?

Josh - What did you mean when you said the support team is unique? Tell us a bit about that, and also generally what you’re known for.

Congratulations on the new role! That’s a pretty incredible skill-up, making the transition from being non-technical to becoming an engineer.

It sounds like a really supportive culture of growth and learning that you have on your teams. On a similar note, what was the moment that made you realize you made the right decision to join Aptible?

What was the most difficult thing you’ve had to overcome to really thrive here?

I think that's the key to actually achieving goals - being able to say “no” to things so that we can say “yes” to the right things.

Alright, as a final question, what makes Aptible different from other companies that you’ve worked for? What resonates with you about this team?

Hear about the experiences of Aptible team members across four different teams - finance, customer success, support, and engineering. This deep dive interview was conducted with the help of our friend, Florian Feichtinger , who helped us bring out the objective stories and perspectives of each team member. Read on!

Beyond the Code: An Inside-Out Conversation with Aptible Team Members

Job search is hard. Have you ever wished that companies could only ever be 

 with you when you’re interviewing for an open role? Or felt let down by joining a company where you meshed perfectly with your interviewers, only to find out the culture fit wasn’t as you expected?

On the flip side, to find the right candidates, companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars on top-notch recruiters, salaries, marketing, and employer branding. But when expectations between employer and employee turn out to be misaligned, it can be a costly and painful experience for both. 

Inspired by the book Give and Get, we’ll dive into the five ingredients that reflect the realities of an employee experience at Aptible: 

Our goal isn’t to pitch you on a perfect, idyllic culture - because we don’t have one. By sharing with you these realities, we hope that they’ll resonate with the type of culture that gives you your sense of purpose, impact and belonging.

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Tell me about Aptible’s challenges, the adversity, and the long road ahead. What are the risks we face as an organization?

Aptible has been fortunate to grow organically since 2014, with minimal investment in marketing and sales. As we move forward, we want to expand our appeal to companies of all sizes and industries, not just early-stage digital health companies. But expanding from 1 to >1 industry and selling to larger companies is a new endeavor for us. We don’t have a built-out go-to-market (GTM) that we can just “turn on” targeting outside of digital health, and our product needs to change to be valuable to a wider range of companies. In support of these ambitious changes, here are the challenges we face:

Each of these challenges are critical for Aptible’s success, which means every single team member plays an important role and this will require a lot of hard work and focus from all of us over the foreseeable future. It’s a high-risk/high-reward type of challenge, because we know that if we get this right, the resulting impact on the world will be massive.

Give me an honest picture of what I’m getting myself into. What are some reasons people may not want to join Aptible?

We’re a team of 20+ operating as a team of 100, which means it’s common for people to wear several hats and need to constantly adapt to a fast-paced and changing environment. We give a lot of responsibility to each team member, because we have to, but we also demand a lot of accountability and self-motivation in return. The scope of your role one year from now may not look or sound the same as the job description you initially applied to. And you’ll often be asked “is the juice worth the squeeze?” for something you want to work on, because we must always ensure the work that we do is high leverage.

You’ll never be micromanaged, but you also won’t be handheld in your role, even during your onboarding. Team members are expected to bring in their expertise starting on Day 1, or be unafraid to be scrappy and ask questions in order to get up to speed. Expect a high level of ambiguity sometimes, especially as we navigate product-market-fit. Leave your egos at the door, because we tackle the hardest problems first, and they’re seldom ones that you can simply find solutions for on your own. There are no gods on our team who have the right answers for everything – just a bunch of people who love solving problems, so you’ll be forced to collaborate and talk to multiple people in your day-to-day.

The trade-off for flexibility in our fully remote work is: building personal relationships is hard. While we try our best to create opportunities to meet and bond in person, what you’ll get is truly dependent on how much effort you choose to give when it comes to meeting others, creating conversations and forming friendships. We’ve found that this is often not the right environment for most people, but for those that it is the right workplace for, we find that they thrive on the independence, responsibility, autonomy, and accountability.

Describe the typical behaviors that exist on the team that makes up the employee experience. What are some behaviors that I might find challenging, and what are some that are supportive?

At Aptible, we operate under a high degree of trust and reliability, so there’s a consistently high expectation of each person being accountable for the quality, timely completion, and impact of their work. We are passionate and curious problem solvers, and we don’t relate to indifference or being stagnant.

If you’re struggling for ideas, clarity or falling behind because of the sheer volume of work, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find a group of teammates who are willing and eager to pitch in and help cross the finish line together. Folks who work here love crossing domain knowledge boundaries and getting their hands on all aspects of product development: ideating, interviewing customers, UX/UI design, testing prototypes, architecture design, DevOps, and everything in between. In other words, if you’re resourceful and like taking the initiative, you will thrive at Aptible.

However, if you’re the type of person who prefers to do the bare minimum or wait to be asked to start before doing, there’s a good chance you’ll fall behind, quickly feeling out of sync and siloed from the rest of your team (we don’t like quiet quitters!). Taking ownership of the role you play in our mission and strategy and supporting one another in doing the same is the best way to grow and be recognized at Aptible.

What are Aptible’s strengths as an organization, how did those come to be, and why are those strengths beneficial to me?

We make decisions with data, and we’re careful and calculated risk-takers, which has helped us build up a strong financial position with a lot of resiliencies, and operational efficiencies. This provides you with benefits in the form of learning budgets, equal and fair compensation, and the freedom to try out tools that enable your best work. At Aptible, you can comfortably focus on building product and doing meaningful work without the fear that failure will result in mass layoffs. You’ll also never be asked to cut corners or compromise quality or security.

What’s the upside of working at Aptible, and how do these relate to my career and development goals?

You’re constantly surrounded by people (not just team members, but customers too!) who care, listen, and proactively offer feedback on ideas and deliverables. It’s easy to get creative, iterate, and see the impact you’re making for developers in real-time. You’ll be surprised by how much you can grow and accomplish, even within a short amount of time.

We’re small and scrappy, love experimentation and trying new things, and backed by our financial strength. So if you want to go through the journey of taking something built from scratch from 0 to 100, and are interested in developer tools and the cloud, you’ll be excited about what we have in store. There’ll be a lot of learning down the road, opportunities for you to own and develop new processes, teams, and shape Aptible into what we’ll become in the next five or ten years.

Given our small team size, everything we work on will be high impact and high leverage. Thriving at Aptible means you’ll have plenty of room to shine and be recognized, and build stories toward your reputation as a leader in your role.

Job search is hard. Have you ever wished that companies could only ever be brutally honest with you when you’re interviewing for an open role? Or felt let down by joining a company where you meshed perfectly with your interviewers, only to find out the culture fit wasn’t as you expected?

Let’s Get Real: reflecting on the realities of working at Aptible

It’s often said that talent is more scarce than capital, which is why technology companies have spent the last decade pouring millions of dollars investing in their people. At Aptible, we also hold strongly to the belief that our people are our most valuable asset. However, we’ve taken a thoughtful and lean approach to maximizing the value of all of our resources.

Human Capital Efficiency — hire with the intention of growing your business, not just growing your team

In the realm of SaaS metrics, there’s a metric called Human Capital Efficiency (ARR / average headcount). In layperson's terms, this is commonly known as the net revenue per employee, or simply how much each employee brings to the business.

At Aptible, when we say we’re a team of 20 operating as a team of 100, we don’t mean that each person does the work of 5 people. What we mean is that 

each team member generates the approximate value of 5 team members

. Aptible is profitable, with a lot of revenue and an infinite cash runway. This makes us resilient during tough times and allows us the freedom to build, take risks, and seize opportunities for growth. We are fortunate to be in this position because we’ve been thoughtful and deliberate with our resources - whether it’s financial capital or human capital.

As much as we invest in our hiring, even a small number of new hires is significant to us, because of the high expectations we have for each new member. When we consider our human capital needs, we start from first principles: 

what resources do we really need to build, maintain and grow our product for our customers?

When we feel the urge to hire, we ask ourselves a couple of questions:

It sounds tedious, but in practicality, this model of decision-making doesn’t slow us down in hiring - rather, it gives us clarity and validation over the importance and value of each new role we create, and ensures they will have the best opportunities to thrive at Aptible.

In addition to being thorough with our human capital, we manage our financial capital by investing significantly in our financial reporting (past and present), forecasting, and modeling (future). But each of these finance processes doesn’t exist in a silo. They’re shared openly with the team and used to align us with value creation.

Twice a month, on the 1st and 15th, we share financial updates internally:

This routine process is important to our business for a couple of reasons. Firstly, executives are empowered by never having to make decisions blindly with no expectation of how those decisions will impact our financial stability. By having two touch-points each month on financial data, we avoid unnecessary surprises from unforeseen changes in our operations and customer base.

Moreover, team members are never kept in the dark about significant changes to our financial performance. If revenue is declining as a result of macroeconomic setbacks, this information is shared with the team in a way that allows us to come up with solutions together. If cash or profitability is suffering, we immediately come up with an improvement plan for teams to work on in the next month or quarter. For example, when we noticed a slow but steady increase in our infrastructure costs, Ashley (VP of Engineering) and Alex (Site Reliability Engineer) were looped in and promptly worked together on margin improvements before the costs escalated to having a noticeable impact on our bottom line.

We built our own financial model in-house because it’s the best way to get the exact level of granularity and accuracy we need. Forecasts are updated during each month-end close, and model assumptions (e.g. our hiring roadmap, customer churn and contraction expectations) are updated on a regular basis throughout each month as new information comes in. This cadence, combined with our reporting process, results in over a 92% average forecast accuracy of our cash, revenue and profitability. And the variances are almost always because we performed better than we expected.

As a team member at Aptible, you can expect to hear and learn about financial metrics regardless of whether you are an engineer, designer, marketer, or any other non-finance role, because finance at Aptible is not just a cost-center that reports numbers. It is a function that uses metrics and data in order to align our team on how we should operate strategically. For example:

This alignment is something that everyone on the team is involved in because the actions and impact of each person on our team affect our revenue and profitability, which directly impacts the value of Aptible. And because every team member receives an equity component in their compensation, we all co-own and benefit from this value-creation and success of Aptible. It’s just another part of what it means for us to

1 Based on 2021 KeyBanc Capital Markets survey results of 350 companies’ upper quartile (75th percentile) HCE of 226k per full-time employee.

The Hyper-efficient Business Model

Like any modern organization, Aptible has a goal of developing and sustaining a high-performing team. Because we’ve always operated as a very lean organization (over $1m ARR/FTE), our people are our most valuable resource, and the quality of our team is especially critical for our success. But building high-performing teams is much harder than it looks.

In July 2023, the Aptible team traveled together for a meetup in Toronto. This was one of our many bi-annual team offsites, and our purpose this time was to come together for a 3-day session workshopping two main facets of our organization - the Aptible Operating System (AOS), and the Aptible Emotional Quotient (AEQ).

A few years ago, Google took one of the first serious stabs at figuring out what contributed to high-performing teams with its Project Aristotle. The Google research team looked at 182 teams, broke down how they performed, and identified all the different structural and demographic makeups that contributed to success or failure.

Surprisingly, Google found that how a team was put together was far more important than who was on it. Specifically, they found five key characteristics of high-performing teams:

 Everyone feels safe in taking risks around their team members, and that they won’t be embarrassed or punished for doing so.

 Everyone completes quality work on time.

 Everyone knows what their specific expectations are. These expectations must be challenging yet attainable.

 Everyone has a sense of purpose in their work (i.e., financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, etc.).

 Everyone sees that the result of their work actually contributes to the organization’s overall goals.

This was a surprising finding, especially when coupled with the realization that there was absolutely no correlation between factors like seniority, tenure, team size, demographics, location (remote vs. on-site), workload, individual performance, or even using principles like consensus-driven decision making. It’s worth repeating that achieving the five characteristics in Project Aristotle seem more relevant than individual performance alone in building a high-performing team.


Aptible aims to fundamentally transform how software developers interact with the cloud and to help developers do more with less infrastructure. To do so, we require great people and a culture that empowers and propels us to do great work. As of today, we’re a small but mighty team of 23. But we know that it will take a significant amount of investment into culture if we want to generate the same level of growth as a high-performing team of 100 or more. Project Aristotle showed the ‘how’ in how high-performing teams are assembled. And we’ve taken a hard look at ourselves as an organization and gone through multiple offsites and evaluations to understand our current strengths and weaknesses.

Compared to the five characteristics from Project Aristotle, Psychological Safety is a core strength at Aptible. Here are some of the things Aptible team members said unprompted in an anonymous survey:

But what about the rest? We are now building two pieces of a framework that will take us through the next phase of creating a high-performing team. The first is the “Aptible Emotional Quotient” (AEQ) and the second is the “Aptible Operating System” (AOS). Specifically, the AOS and AEQ are intended to define ‘how’ Aptible works together, culturally and in terms of process and operations.


The Aptible Emotional Quotient (AEQ) is all about how we connect with one another. It covers communication, connection, accountability, disclosure, feedback, and expectations, with the goal of building trust so that the team is free to take risks. AEQ is an effort to formalize and build upon Aptible’s foundation of psychological safety, which is especially important for allowing new team members to adapt to and fit into teams successfully.

The goal is to build a culture of trust and accountability. Aptible team members work to improve parts of their AEQ every day. By being effective at setting clear expectations, disclosing information and issues, and providing and receiving clear and rapid feedback, the team understands what everyone else is doing better. This creates dependability, the second characteristic under Project Aristotle, and results in an environment where risk-taking, innovation, creativity, and healthy conflict are encouraged and can thrive.!


If the AEQ is about how we connect with one another, the Aptible Operating System (AOS) focuses on how we operate as a team. It’s about the structure of the team and all the pieces that make the machinery of an Aptible team work efficiently.

The AOS is built on a foundation of Aptible’s mission and values. Imagining our AOS as a house, the shared practices, processes and operations that make up the rest of the AOS are like the structural supports that hold our organization together.

By having a shared set of practices and processes, we create an environment where team members have a clear understanding of what they can expect from one another, how to fulfill those expectations, and get things done.

The Aptible Emotional Quotient and Operating System play a significant role in improving the way we operate. It defines the way we build connections and improves our ability to use disclosure, feedback and expectations, and gives us a framework for improving how we work together.

These are the foundational elements of how Aptible is taking the lessons of Project Aristotle and applying them within our team to achieve the five characteristics of a high-performing team.

If you are excited by the rigorous and thoughtful approach that Aptible is taking and by the work that Aptible is doing, then please visit our career page to see if there are any opportunities for you to get involved!

Aptible AOS & AEQ [part 1]: How We Create and Manage Lean, High-Performing Teams at Aptible

Like any modern organization, Aptible has a goal of developing and sustaining a high-performing team. Because we’ve always operated as a very lean organization (over $1m ARR/FTE), our people are our most valuable resource, and the quality of our team is especially critical for our success. But building high-performing teams is much harder than it looks. 

Inspired by the principles outlined in Google’s Project Aristotle, 

 with the goal of building a high-performing team. Once we had done that, we came together as a group, each person sharing the tensions and bright spots they feel with our existing culture and how we operate. In the spirit of transparency, we’re sharing some of the feedback and learnings we heard, and how we plan to tackle improvements in those areas.


The nature of working at a technology startup is extremely challenging. There’s a high rate of innovation with low barriers to entry in the technology space. Companies have to move quickly, adapt, and continuously look for ways to achieve and maintain competitive advantage in order to be successful. This puts pressure directly on the people of those companies, which is why you’ll often hear behaviors defined in terms such as “fast-paced, scrappy, wear multiple hats”.

Aptible is no exception to these challenges, especially as we try to grow our business and expand product-market-fit. With a current team of 20 or so, we feel pain sometimes in the form of ambiguity, scope extending beyond our job descriptions, and the constant tradeoff between hard problems we must tackle, versus technical debt. It was unsurprising to us that when we asked, the team gave us significant areas for improvement. We found that the biggest areas for improvement are in the second and third characteristics of high performing teams discovered by Project Aristotle: Dependability, and Structure & Clarity.


Project Aristotle defines Dependability as: Team members get things done on time and meet a high bar for excellence.

However, the team told us that there’s "so much to do, [with] limited bandwidth and team members, so it’s hard to focus on what’s important when everything’s important" and "I don’t think we say no enough, which leads to overwork and missed expectations." This feedback suggests that in our pursuit of Dependability we are lacking in a key aspect of achieving Dependability — Focus.

It was clear to us from the feedback that without allowing the team to have focus, we fail to provide the time and space for them to do good work in a reasonable amount of time. At many companies, team members will resort to working longer hours in order to meet deadlines, which harms work-life balance, morale, and ultimately, organizational health. At Aptible, it was important for us to improve Dependability in a way that results in us working more effectively, rather than working more. For example, we think that improving Focus starts in the planning process, and being more collaborative when deciding what to work on. Starting in Q3, team leads have taken a more active role in planning than they had in past quarters. Going forward, we expect them to have even more involvement and responsibility in quarterly planning.

Another approach we are taking is to be more collaborative about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Functional leads and individual team members now define their OKRs and commit to them rather than having them handed down by executives without input. This makes OKRs more accurate and creates alignment around responsibilities and actual work.

The biggest change we’re trying to make as an organization is to foster and maintain the discipline to say “no”, or recognize tradeoffs when considering new projects and opportunities. For example, when customer feedback highlights an area as an extremely important one for the whole organization, before adding it to our workflow, we take time to agree on the amount of work it creates, what needs to be dropped, and what we need to do to ensure we can actually drop it.

Most importantly, focus isn’t just about saying “no”. Being successful at achieving focus should result in us being able to say “yes” to bigger, more impactful work. And it will take some time and practice for us to build up a habit of appropriately rejecting ideas and work that aren’t critical to achieving the most valuable goals.

The problem with teams that have to resort to being “scrappy” and “wear multiple hats” is that it’s easy to lose sight of what people are actually responsible for. This can quickly spiral into problematic ways of working such as organizational ADHD, scope creep, loss of accountability, and team members disengaging when they don’t understand their role.

At Aptible, we want each person to have clear roles and expectations. And we also strive to set plans and goals that are exciting, motivating, and achievable. But we suffer from a lot of those problems, and there’s much room for improvement, as noted in the feedback from the team:

The feedback clearly outlined the areas where we feel Aptible has work to do with regards to Structure and Clarity. We’ll take a quick look at our plans in each of these areas.

Being a startup in a very competitive space, we need to adapt quickly in order to stay ahead. The problem this causes is that strategies change fast and often, and the road to success isn’t always certain.

We started reading Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage as a teamwide activity in order to create roundtable discussions around organizational health, and to try and adapt his framework of answering 6 critical questions. Specifically, our goal for improving clarity and alignment is for everyone to unanimously agree and be very clear on the answers to:

Based on the feedback we received, it is clear that we need to hire for key roles to provide additional leverage and bandwidth, and to try to reduce the amount of ‘overwhelm’. To improve our understanding of roles and team structure we’re also striving to ensure that every function in Aptible has a documented Charter, which each Team Lead is responsible for authoring.

Some of the changes outlined above will help with this, including documented OKRs, having DRIs and more discussion during reviews, but there is clearly more work to do here.

Additionally, we recognize there’s a lot of important work happening behind the scenes to support and retain our existing customers, as well as nurture prospects. This is being owned by our Customer Experience team (composed of customer success, customer reliability engineers, and other helping hands). We know that these team members don’t spend much time in the spotlight because their work is continuous, rather than project based, and we’d like to create more visibility around just how impactful their work is. As such, we’re going to start experimenting with regular “Customer Spotlight” sessions, where we share detailed stories about support, retention and conversion, and all the magic we do for our customers.


We expect all of the practices and procedures we’ve outlined in this post and the 

previous one

 to become ingrained in the whole team and we will be revisiting them regularly to improve, course correct and grow.

If we go back to Project Aristotle and the five characteristics of high performing teams, we haven’t formally addressed the last two characteristics with AOS and AEQ. These characteristics are Impact and Meaning. To a certain extent, we are already on the right path with these, knowing that our work has both meaning and impact for the company and our customers. But we would be doing ourselves and our customers a disservice if we didn’t address these two characteristics with the same rigor and detail with which we are approaching the others. Stay tuned for how we will move forward with these and in improving and growing what we are already doing.

Aptible AOS & AEQ [part 2]: Next Steps In Building a Great Team at Aptible

The landscape of front-end engineering has changed drastically in the last few years. In the past, front-end engineers were depended upon to translate design comps into functioning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. More recently, with the explosion of the JavaScript ecosystem, front-end engineers are now expected to work more broadly across the entire stack, and in some cases, have more of a traditional computer science background. So is there still a place for front-end engineers who still enjoy writing CSS?

UX Engineers sit between product design and front-end engineering and help facilitate collaboration between the two. They usually maintain similar technical skills as the front-end engineer, but they are more specialized in their knowledge of UX design principles and have a keen eye for design.

At Aptible, UX Engineers play an important role in helping shape the user experience of our products. For this reason, UX Engineers are members of the design team and regularly collaborate with product designers to review and scope new UX features. UX Engineers determine the technical feasibility of implementing the proposed UX and conceptualize how it should be built.

Aptible’s UX Engineers focus their efforts primarily on translating design assets into functioning prototypes, patterns, or components which can then be implemented in the product or added to the design system. They advise when to apply an existing pattern or component versus creating new ones.

Usually, the work of implementing a new feature within the product is the responsibility of our front-end engineers, but sometimes UX Engineers are tasked with building or improving upon existing UX within our products themselves, which depends on the scope, timeline, and type of feature being implemented. In these cases, UX Engineers and front-end engineers may collaborate together to ship the feature.

Another main responsibility of UX Engineers is to build and maintain our design system, which we call Arrow. Arrow is a collaborative effort between product designers and UX Engineers to normalize design patterns, styles, and language. However, UX Engineers own Arrow and develop it as a separate product by maintaining a roadmap, grooming and planning sprints, building the architecture, and implementing features. Aptible UX Engineers split their time 50/50 between Arrow and product feature development.

Some of the other areas of focus for an Aptible UX Engineer include:

As the landscape of JavaScript continues to evolve, there will be a need for specialists all along the spectrum of front-end engineering. UX Engineers at Aptible are an important part of the product development process by blending UX knowledge with technical skills to fill the gap between product design and front-end engineering.

What is a UX Engineer at Aptible?

This is Part 3 of a 3-Part Series. If you missed our last post, 

It was 2014, and our CEO (Chas) and CTO (Frank) had been working side-by-side in New York, NY on the beginnings of Aptible. They were ready to grow the business and found a talented Product Designer to join. The only challenge was that said Product Designer lived in San Diego, CA, and he wasn’t planning on moving any time soon. Could an early stage startup successfully get off the ground with over 2,000+ Miles between its founding members?

The answer, we’ve learned, is a resounding yes. Not only did we hire that Product Designer (Skylar), but over six years later, he’s had an outsized positive impact on the business and now leads our Design Team at Aptible. Throughout that time, he’s also gotten married, had two children, and moved cross-country (not once, but twice)! Today, Aptible is proudly “Remote-First,” with fifty team members based in forty cities across North America. In retrospect, had we not prioritized people over geographical centralization since our earliest days, Aptible would be a completely different company today.

The Aptible Team at our Virtual Onsite, May 2020

We're passionate about building a diverse team of talented people who accomplish great things together, regardless of where they are. We know that our ability to achieve our mission is contingent on ensuring our team performs at a high level and making Aptible the best environment to support that kind of team. We can’t control what’s happening outside of Aptible, but we can be certain that we have a greater chance at long-term success if our center holds. This means that the core of Aptible—our team and its culture—must be strong, through every phase of growth.

But how do you create that center when there’s technically no center at all — no headquarters, and practically no physical assets? We believe it begins with being intentional about the culture we're trying to create, and taking the time to explicitly articulate what we mean by "us". Here, we share three tactics for scaling culture on a rapidly growing, distributed team.

Part 3 | Communications Architecture: Establish Norms for How You Come Together

If you’ve been following along in this three-part series, perhaps you’ve started to pick up on a theme: We believe that intentional culture design is necessary for creating a center that holds on a distributed team. And a large part of that design work lies in establishing clear expectations around what work needs to be done, and how it should be done.

At Aptible, we often refer to a set of “how we’ll work together” expectations as a social contract. And in establishing that social contract, we lean towards explicit expectations — those that are based on conversation and instruction, rather than those that are based on inferences and interpretations, or on assumptions and past experiences. As members of a fully distributed company, we have limited opportunities to develop inferences and assumptions about how we work (i.e. I can’t casually peek into a conference room to get a feel for how meetings are conducted here), so setting explicit expectations becomes critical to our success as collaborators. 

For teams that are transitioning to a distributed model for the first time — or teams that are looking to improve the way they work remotely — here, we offer our advice for establishing expectations and norms around how you come together as a company.

It’s one thing to give a new employee Slack and Zoom accounts, but it’s quite another to document and have a conversation about how they should use Slack and Zoom. Social contracts exist any time you interact with another person on these platforms — the variation in social contracts is in how explicit they are.

 represents our collection of expectations, and in it, we establish an explicit Communications Architecture:

For example, we’ve established a norm that everyone has their video on during all calls. On distributed teams where the most high-frequency communication is often textual, it’s critical to hash things out face-to-face on video calls — where you can read facial expressions and body language. We advise Aptilians that if they find themselves writing long messages in Slack or multiple exchanges over email, it may be an opportune time to get on a video call.

With that said, we’re sensitive to the fact that teammates are working across multiple time zones, and might not always be available to join a synchronous meeting. As such, we encourage everyone to record conversations in Gong.io or Zoom, and/or capture minutes in Google Docs or other shared resources. This helps us keep key stakeholders in the loop, while minimizing the number meetings overall.

In the absence of a ritual around gathering daily at a physical office, we work to create a predictable rhythm around how we come together at Aptible. We use a variety of meetings with different cadences and different scopes to help teammates feel connected, empowered, focused, and informed.

A Sampling of Recurring Meetings at Aptible

In an effort to create as clear of a drumbeat as possible, we work to hold meetings that stakeholders feel a strong need to attend. To this end, we encourage everyone to get clear on the goal of every get-together, distribute and review collateral in advance, identify clear roles (e.g. MC, Scribe, Timekeeper, etc.), minimize distractions and maximize focus on the conversation at hand.

Lastly, we recommend setting the expectation that all of this is, ultimately, is an experiment. If a recurring meeting is no longer serving its purpose, we want people to surface feedback and change what isn’t working — or to cancel it altogether and give people their time back.

A Snippet (Anonymized) of a Real Conversation at Aptible (via Slack)

Consider sending a short survey to solicit feedback from participants as soon as possible after “expensive” company-wide meetings like All-Hands or Offsite/Onsite Workshops: Was the information presented useful? Was the information presented engaging? What did you like about this? How could we have improved this? Then, use that feedback to continually refine how you come together as a team and ensure the highest signal-to-noise ratio.

At Aptible, we’ve seen meaningful returns on taking the time to establish explicit “how we’ll work together” expectations. While we’re proud of the 

, we know that this is really just the beginning. Establishing explicit expectations is a practice we continue to learn at Aptible — and the act of forming and continuously updating them brings us in closer alignment, even and especially when we’re physically apart.

Checklist: Create your own Communications Architecture

Intentional & Explicit Culture, Part 3: 3 Tools for Creating a “Center that Holds” on a Fully Distributed Team

This is Part 2 of a 3-Part Series. If you missed our last post, 

Part 2 | Values Interviews: Identify People Who'll Expand Your Culture

At Aptible, we believe that culture isn’t created through shiny offices and unlimited perks, but by building a team of people with whom our values resonate. That’s why we actively seek teammates who demonstrate alignment with the behaviors and skills we care about most — and make the difficult decision to let go of those who don’t.

To be clear, “alignment” here doesn’t imply that our personal values completely align with Aptible’s Values, nor does it imply that they are objectively superior to any other set of values. What we are seeking in prospective teammates is a willingness to commit themselves within the context of work to our mission to build trust on the internet, as well as the way in which we seek to pursue it as a team.

We believe that alignment with Aptible’s Values doesn’t imply a homogenous culture, either, but rather a dynamic one. We know that there are an infinite number of ways in which our colleagues can embody them, and celebrate the fact that each person will shape our culture with their own unique perspectives and experiences. This is how you scale culture on a rapidly growing, distributed team.

Aptible Team Members (From Left to Right): Albert Wong, Sarah Veirs, Chris Gomes

To this end, we incorporate a “Values Interview” into the recruitment process for every single open position at Aptible. Regardless of where the open position sits within the organization, no hiring decision can be made at Aptible without a Values Interview. Assuming that a candidate has met or exceeded our expectations for role-related knowledge/skills earlier in the recruitment process, a successful Values Interview is a strong indicator that they’ll receive an offer from Aptible. Here’s how we’ve built a Values Interview Program at Aptible, and how you can, too.

We conduct Structured Interviews at Aptible — which means that we use the same methods to assess candidates who are being considered for the same role — because 

. For each open position, we use the same interview questions, grade candidate responses on the same scale, and make hiring decisions based on consistent, predetermined qualifications.

Structured Interviews ensure that any variation in candidate assessment is a result of the candidate’s performance — not because an Interviewer has higher or lower standards, or asks easier or harder questions. We’ve also found that they create a better experience for candidates.

Unlike other stages of our interview process that focus on role-related knowledge, the Values Interview is a discussion focused on a candidate’s motivations and alignment with 

. After co-creating three “Core Values” — Pillars, Cultural Tools, Operating Frameworks — our People Operations and Leadership Teams developed a bank of 2-3 behavioral questions for each.

A behavioral question looks at how a candidate has handled a specific challenge in the past, and usually starts with phrases such as “Tell me about a time when X”. For the Values Interview, we intentionally avoided hypothetical questions, which evaluate how a candidate would handle a challenge they may not have encountered yet, and often begin with “Imagine that...” Why? Behavioral questions help us reveal a candidate’s patterns of behavior. And the more those patterns of behavior sound like Aptible’s Values, the more likely they’ll succeed at Aptible.

Create a Scorecard & Calibrate Assessments

To ensure that our Values Interviewers pull from the same bank of questions, we created a reusable scorecard within our ATS (Applicant Tracking System), Lever, as well as a supplemental template for notetaking in Google Documents. It’s critical that Values Interviewers maintain a record of well-documented, comprehensive feedback of candidate answers, so that all members of the Hiring Team can easily review and evaluate responses.

To provide Values Interviewers with additional guidance, we’ve documented examples of what “Good” and “Poor” responses look like. We encourage discussion and calibration among Values Interviewers, so that they’re increasingly confident and consistent in their assessments, as well.

A (Redacted) Snippet of our Values Interview Scorecard in Lever

Our Values Interviews are currently conducted by members of the Leadership and People Teams, but we’ve just launched a robust training program that will give any Aptible Team member the opportunity to lead a Values Interview. Our vision is to build a diverse cohort of participants who can provide candidates with insight into multiple disciplines across Aptible. We want every team member — irrespective of function, role, and seniority — to feel like an owner and an active participant in the endeavor of building the Aptible Team.

Trainees of the Values Interview Program are required to complete self-guided training modules, shadow Values Interviews, conduct mock Values Interviews, and be shadowed by an experienced Values Interviewer.

A Snippet of the Self-Guided Portion of Values Interview Training in Lessonly

Trainees will be evaluated for their ability to effectively conduct a Values Interview and develop an understanding of whether a candidate demonstrates the behaviors and skills we care about at Aptible.

A Snippet of our Scorecard for Values Interview Program Trainees

We’ve been conducting Values Interviews at Aptible for almost 2 Years now, and we’re still refining and reinventing how we conduct these conversations every day. Based on feedback from our Values Interviewers and Interviewees alike, we’ve overhauled our bank of questions, expanded upon our shared understanding of what good responses look like, and modified the agenda and flow of these calls over time.

But the utility and importance of these conversations endures: By creating space for candidates to engage directly with Aptible’s Values, we’re able to identify the people who are not only likely to succeed in their individual roles, but are motivated to help strengthen the core of Aptible — our team and its culture.

Checklist: Create your own Values Interview Program

Intentional & Explicit Culture, Part 2: 3 Tools for Creating a “Center that Holds” on a Fully Distributed Team

It was 2014, and our CEO (Chas) and CTO (Frank) had been working side-by-side in New York, NY on the beginnings of Aptible. They were ready to grow the business and found a talented Product Designer to join. The only challenge was that said Product Designer lived in Indianapolis, IN, and he wasn’t planning on moving any time soon. Could an early stage startup successfully get off the ground with hundreds of miles between its founding members?

Part 1 | Values, Pillars, Themes: Define the Behaviors You Care About Most

As a team, one of the most important things we’ve done together is co-create 

. We believe that it’s critical for every company to establish a common language around a set of shared attitudes about work — but we’re convinced that it’s even more critical on a distributed team and at an earlier point in its trajectory. In the absence of a physical HQ, employees have fewer opportunities to observe how their colleagues act on a day-to-day basis — and which of those behaviors get rewarded — so we have to put this in writing. Here’s how we’ve done this at Aptible, and how you can, too.

To develop a set of values that resonate with and are genuinely lived by your team, we recommend inviting every employee to participate in the process. At just twelve employees, we circulated a questionnaire (via Google Forms) of seven simple, open-ended questions that helped us consider the many ways in which Aptible already expressed what it values through its team, products, operations, communications, and beyond.

We collected and distilled this feedback (6,000+ words!) into eight high-level thematic buckets, with tentative titles for the purpose of discussion. Here’s an example of one of the themes that emerged in our conversations at Aptible:

“We’re committed to the team and to building something special, to riding the emotional ups and downs of a startup well, to having grit and grinding it out.” “I believe we've done a fantastic job of doubling down on people who work hard on their crafts.” “What I admire most is the level that everyone cares about what we do.” “Work Ethic: No one here is afraid of work.” “Persistence and Resolve” “We have a culture of consistently showing up to do the hard work when needed. This has allowed us to consistently do a lot with a little.” “Grit: Perseverance in Problem Solving” “Investors are always impressed with our capital efficiency and customers are impressed with how much we do with so few people, both of which are a function of discipline and perseverance. “Thinking Big Together” “I admire when we push through the discomfort to get to the essence of the issue. I've heard this referred to as ‘muddling through it together,’ or ‘wrestling with it.’” “When our smarts are combined with our tolerance for hard work, we are able to realize compounding gains in what we are able to achieve.”

While the Leadership Team took full ownership of the distillation process at Aptible, we think this could be owned by any passionate, cross-functional committee of ambassadors at your organization. We recommend sticking to fewer than 10 themes, though, to facilitate a focused discussion within your organization moving forward.

We used our annual Aptible Onsite as an opportunity to hold a “Values Workshop,” where we refined the themes together — which entailed eliminating or splitting out themes, and turning them into memorable phrases. After some context setting and examination of inspirational examples of company values (e.g. 

, etc.), we created groups and tasked them with crafting a Statement and Description for 3+ Themes in under 60 Minutes.

“This was good because it was tough,” said one Aptilian. “We had to go from some squishy, linguistic concepts and boil them down to real meaning. I also liked seeing that other groups came up with the same high-level concepts. We're aligned, ultimately and that was nice to see.”

A Sampling of Notes from our Values Workshop at the Aptible Onsite in 2018

The outcome of the workshop astounded us, both as a way to achieve alignment and yield statements that were just a polish or two away from a publishable state. “The ultimate results of the workshop — the different sets of values produced by each group — were very useful,” said another teammate. “Even though no group completed their Mission & Values 100%, we were able to surface some new and important themes in just the 2 Hours allocated to the workshop, and that's quite an accomplishment.” We were proud to share the first iteration of our values front and center on our Company Page, and sought opportunities to promote them daily.

Part of what it means to scale culture is being open to evolving it. After several months of invoking our seven values, we found that they promoted a strong culture, as measured by employee engagement — and that they resonated strongly with potential employees, as seen and heard in conversations with candidates. But there were too many. Candidates and Aptilians couldn’t remember them all! And not all of them could be used to shape decision making on a day-to-day basis.

As such, we solicited input from the entire team and assembled a cross-functional, volunteer-based “Values Working Group” to put a critical eye to Aptible’s Values and experiment with how to improve them. Ultimately, we edited and reframed them into three new “Core Values” — Pillars, Cultural Tools, Operating Frameworks — with examples and quotations that illustrate each.

How the Aptible Values 1.0 Map to Values 2.0

We’ve since published the Aptible Values v2.0 to our Company Page, along with a new section of our 

 that answers the following key questions: Why have values? What makes for a good set of values? What are Aptible's Values?

Aptible’s first set of values helped us define what we expect of each other, but ultimately reflected baseline qualities that teammates are expected to adhere to in a binary way: For example, we’re either committed to the mission, or we aren’t. Our newest set of values defines how we do things at Aptible and enable us to make decisions quickly.

If you haven’t begun defining the specific behaviors and skills you care about most on your team: Just start. When prompted, your colleagues will likely have a lot to say about the qualities of the people they want to work with and who will thrive at your company. You won’t get it right the first time around, and probably shouldn’t: The value in establishing these cultural tools lies in the conversations you’ll have about how well they support the culture you’re trying to build over time — a process of ongoing reflection and action.

Checklist: Create your own set of Core Values

Blog: Working @ Aptible

Questions You’re Asking in Interviews

Beyond the Code: An Inside-Out Conversation with Aptible Team Members

Let’s Get Real: reflecting on the realities of working at Aptible

The Hyper-efficient Business Model

Aptible AOS & AEQ [part 1]: How We Create and Manage Lean, High-Performing Teams at Aptible

Aptible AOS & AEQ [part 2]: Next Steps In Building a Great Team at Aptible

What is a UX Engineer at Aptible?

Intentional & Explicit Culture, Part 3: 3 Tools for Creating a “Center that Holds” on a Fully Distributed Team

Intentional & Explicit Culture, Part 2: 3 Tools for Creating a “Center that Holds” on a Fully Distributed Team

Intentional & Explicit Culture, Part I: 3 Tools for Creating a “Center that Holds” on a Fully Distributed Team

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