Hi! I’m Jaime, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Co-Founder of PayMongo, a fintech company. I've been managing the PayMongo Engineering team since day one and last August, I started handling the Product team as well. Our team is composed of:
- Infrastructure
- Design (UI and UX)
- Fraud and Risk
- Product Manager
- Software Engineer
- Scrum Master
- Software Quality Engineer
- …and Team Lead + Head per team
During one-on-one meetings with new hires, one thing I would always ask is, "What convinced you to join PayMongo?" Most of the answers are about our good company culture. I wrote this article to share with everyone exactly what this culture is.
Culture is very important to us at PayMongo. In fact, our hiring process includes a segment wherein we assess if our company's shared values may or may not be the right fit for applicants, and vice versa.
Our team motto is:
With great freedom comes great responsibility.
Our way of doing things revolves around this principle. Here are some highlights of our culture:
Hiring
- We take hiring seriously. We heavily invest time in finding the right talent based on our set of criteria.
- Interviews work both ways. As we check if the applicant passed the company’s criteria, the applicant is expected to make their own assessment on whether or not the company meets their expectations.
Meetings
- Meetings are discouraged if the agenda is not clear.
- We value punctuality. Meetings should start and end on time.
- We avoid having a meeting by initially writing a narrative about what we want to share and ask feedback on the document. In cases that require team members to align on goals and tasks, we schedule meetings.
Leadership
- We lead with context, not control. To give the team more creative freedom with their work, we don't tell them what to do. Instead, we communicate the goals that we have in mind with proper context. Being unclear and having assumptions will give inevitably produce bad results.
- We practice what we preach.
- When someone commits mistakes, we don’t blame them. Instead, we ask ourselves what context we failed to set. Are we clear and inspiring enough in expressing our goals and strategy? Have we clearly explained all the assumptions and risks that will help the team make good decisions? Are we highly aligned on the objectives?
Work Dynamics
- We are results-oriented. We don’t operate on a clock in click out system. We don’t encourage anyone to work beyond office hours. We are a team of night owls and early birds. Everyone manages their own time.
- Overtime is heavily discouraged. Overtime is a sign of bad time management for us.
- We are fans of one-on-one meetings. These meetings help us connect more with other people beyond work.
- We are a sports team, not a family. For us, family means staying together regardless of “performance”. A sports team will not tolerate an unsatisfactory performance and they are open to share their insights to the team. The receiver considers feedback as something that can be used for them to grow or improve.
- We encourage everyone to say exactly what’s on their mind—not to attack anyone, but to get feelings, opinions, and feedback out in the open, so that these can be dealt with. Everyone is encouraged to assume positive intent regardless of what anybody says.
- If anyone in the team disagrees with a colleague, we make sure that we don’t disagree just to look like the smartest person in the room. We provide some suggestions on how to improve an idea or perhaps make sure that sentiments are explained thoroughly.
- Everyone acts in the best interests of the company and not for themselves or for their supervisor.
- By default, employees don’t need the leads’ approval to move forward for a certain task but they should let the leads and the team know what’s going on. If someone is unsure with their decision which may involve some risk, they don’t hesitate to reach out to their leads.
- Being the smartest guy in the room is not enough. If you cannot work well with others, then being smart is useless.
- Failure is part of our growth. We discuss failure and room for improvement.
- We encourage a culture of experimentation. We try out different things e.g. processes, software development, team building activities in order to find what’s best for what we do.
Personal Growth
- We do whatever we can to achieve our own goals. Leaders in the company are always trying to find ways to give everyone a conducive environment to reach their goals. It’s up to everyone to utilize that environment.
- If someone’s tempted to entertain jobs from other companies, they are able to openly discuss this with their team leads.
There you go! This glimpse of our culture is a growing list. If you're still curious about our culture and our way of doing things, one of our engineers, Steph, shares her personal experience about what it's like working in PayMongo in this article.
I'd like to give a shout-out to the 60+ talented people under my team. I’m always grateful and proud of what we achieve every day.
If you like what you’ve just read, we are hiring!
Software Engineer: https://jobs.lever.co/paymongo/fb773a29-0beb-4e84-9d7e-384c4df186ae
Software QA Engineer: https://jobs.lever.co/paymongo/aa8c5246-4ed8-473d-a439-13795e9e0ae5
Product Designer: https://jobs.lever.co/paymongo/be0e11a5-dded-4fcb-944e-c26688e15f33
UI Designer: https://hire.lever.co/jobs/internal/91b26e58-f82d-4bd3-8b36-99be26ad5360
UX Researcher: https://jobs.lever.co/paymongo/d56188ee-4454-4469-b488-83bf882b4fbc
Product Manager: https://jobs.lever.co/paymongo/841dff3b-5b3b-4ae6-bd54-a2c4db410c0d
For other roles, visit https://jobs.lever.co/paymongo to learn more.
This article was originally published on Medium on October 6, 2021.
