Thank you, Pipedrive! ??

Joining Pipedrive three years ago was one of the best decisions I've ever made. The goal was to build a new Engineering office in Prague and by my own standards, I'm very happy with the outcome ??. It's very hard to put into words what I'm feeling when I'm leaving Pipedrive

By no means, Pipedrive has been a regular job for me. Not only because I got to try many different roles and step out of my comfort zone so many times I barely have a comfort zone now ?? Also because Pipedrive is a very special company and I got to learn many things that changed me and my way of looking at company culture and sustainably growing a business.

With this thank you note, I would like to draw a symbolic line and pay a tribute to all the great people who were part of the journey.

Here's why it has been a great decision to join Pipedrive, what did I learn and what am I grateful for! And also a couple of reasons why I believe Pipedrive is a great company to work for.

Radical trust

Never ever have I experienced such amount of trust from a company towards their employees. The company sets the rules and boundaries, gives people tools and it's up to each individual what are they going to do with the freedom and how do they define their own role in the company.

From the very beginning, I was given a scary amount of freedom and trust. It has been even overwhelming at times, I have never organized an event for 100 people, never hired an office manager, product designer, or a recruiter before, or set up and driven an employer branding strategy on a new market.

Thanks to the sheer volume of freedom and support from other locations I was given, I was able to make many decisions quickly and move much faster than I anticipated. I naturally made mistakes and wrong decisions, but there was no blaming or shaming. Only learning from those mistakes and doing it better the next time.

Investment into people

It's needless to say investment into the people pays off, so I will not say it. Instead, let me give some examples which worked and which contributed big to Pipdrive's numerous people awards.

Example 1: Each new joiner would start their onboarding in Tallinn for 2 weeks. We could do onboarding remotely, but for the people, being able to experience the core of the culture in the headquarters office, make connections in person and form early bonds with the company in a new environment was just priceless. Of course, the trip had a price tag, but it's exactly the kind of investment into people the company decided to do and which paid off in both the short and long run.

Example 2: Personal coaches. It's the first time I've seen a company hiring full-time psychologists, who are available to employees as personal coaches. Why it's a worthy investment is very simple:

1. People get support for their personal problems when needed
2. People can easily consult work-related problems without escalating them
3. Managers get support for handling difficult team situations
4. Leaders get regular and proper training from professionals who know the company environment really well
5. All the employees feel the company cares about them and their well-being by just having these coaches around!

Example 3: Bring the people together. Regardless of how advanced a remote work setup is, personal touch and connection cannot be fully replaced. I don't remember a case when it made sense for anyone in any role or seniority who needed to travel to a different office to meet somebody or a team, who would be denied the request. Travelling is costly and should not be overused, but applying common sense to traveling needs pays off in people's loyalty.

Humble product development

Our CFO Dominic once told me, "Do you know what's the most common mistake people at Pipedrive make?". "They think they know our customers." Pipedrive has almost 100k customers in 160 countries all around the world. They come from countless industries and you can almost never generalize any statement to all of the customers, simply because of the sheer broadness of the spectrum.

Here's another example from the early months of our Leadbooster product development demonstrating, how to humbly approach product development and important decisions. Our designer Karolin, was demonstrating a new design prototype to the team. She has been working on it for weeks and put a lot of herself into it. At the end of the demo, she chuckled and made a quiet remark: "I'm really curious how will the users react during user testing". Suppressing her ego, she was ready to hear real feedback from our customers willing to adjust and change her baby design into something that will be the best fit for the real world.

Humble product development means, you make bold assumptions, you design bold solutions, but you always validate with the market, you do your research, read the data and swallow your pride when you're proven wrong.

Self-managing teams and flat orgs are a real thing!

The scale is pretty wide if you think about the term self-managing team. It can go all the way from Holacracy or Sociocracy 3.0 to letting your team choose working hours. I think there's a sweet spot and that at Pipedrive, we were pretty close to finding it. Based on the Tribes & Missions framework, one Engineering Manager of a tribe can comfortably lead 20-25 software engineers as direct reports, giving them enough space for breathing and self-managing, while eliminating some common pitfalls of completely leader-less self-managing models.

Over the period of 3 years, I have learned that the key pillars of the framework were very well chosen and survived the test of time. What was crucial for the model to keep working was constant fine-tuning and changes of the parameters. In other words, listening to feedback and acting on improvement action points.

Tribes and Missions became my favorite topic and gave me so many insights for my future work. Reach out to me, I'll be happy to debate.

Positions vs. roles

An essential part of flat organizations is the ability to assume different roles in time, regardless of what your job title or position description says. In other words, do what's currently needed without the fuss and overhead related to reorganization.

I personally assumed more roles than I can count now. When I was joining the company, our VP of Engineering Martti told me, "Go and define your own role. Do what you seem fitting and nobody will stop you.". And that's true for almost any position at Pipedrive, especially in Engineering.

With flexible roles, the company gets much faster solutions to complex tasks and problems, because people don't wait for somebody else to unblock them. Very often, they put on the hat needed for the problem at hand and just fix it themselves. Not only solving it faster but also leaves them with a superhuman feeling and boosts their competencies going forward. It worked on me for sure ??.

Long term growth

When you do so many things right, choose shortcuts wisely, and continuously invest in your team and people, long-term growth is inevitable, stress-free, and pleasant. In other words, a great place to work.

What's next?

That's for a separate article. As a teaser, I'll only say that I'm super excited to join Hopin to help build the next-generation platform for events.