Blog @ Percolate

What can be learned from a long walk? Teamwork.

The Bell Labs research facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey, home to some of the greatest minds, innovations and products of the 20th century was built in 1941.

The facility was designed with a 700 foot hallway connecting the research departments to each other and to the cafeteria. Why a 700 foot long hallway? Because Frank Jewett and Mervin Kelly at Bell Labs knew a longer walk between offices would increase the likelihood co-workers from different disciplines would pass, chat, and collaborate. They also knew communication was important for innovation and improvement, which is why they also adopted a strict open door policy for researchers, regardless of their level or seniority, encouraging entering and asking questions.

What can a team of 15 or even 40 learn from the Bell Labs model which had to accommodate 3,000 – 4,000 researchers? Well, there is a prevalent myth at small companies, particularly startups, as they grow that things were better “back in the day”. “Oh the good old days of working late into the night and doing it the hard way!” The truth is, it wasn’t better back then. As you grow the work gets better, more focused, and (for certain things) easier. Growth means there is a bigger team to rely on; more collective talent, more brain power, more heads for collaboration, more solutions and more hours back in the day. Stop to look around as you grow, there are probably more amazing people around than last year.

But one thing does change, and I’d argue this is the reason fast-growing companies yearn for the past. That thing is communication.

The challenge as companies grow is they require more physical space, and this often puts a real, literal distance between employees and teams. The entire company can no longer lean in at 9 PM and ask “how did we do today”? Teams get bigger and more specialized, decisions are made by teams, not by the company as a whole over lunch or in a rental car on the way to a meeting. So how do you keep the small, collaborative, intimate feel without adding a 700 foot hallway to the bathroom? Build systems which encourage, embrace and create value in cross team communications (particularly with the new guy).

Introducing Percolate

At Percolate we are building systems now to ensure we continue to maintain our open, questioning culture whether we have eight people or 3,000 sprawling across several international offices. In January we launched our first internal product to help solve this: Barista.

Barista was built to encourage all staff to ask and answer questions about Percolate, technologies, best practices, the neighborhood around the office, anything in fact. Anyone can ask and anyone can answer. Each question can be tagged with topics which can be subscribed to, you can even tag a question with an individual you feel may be best to answer it. The team also thought through asking questions well, as you write a new question we prompt you with similar questions which were previously asked; perhaps you’re not alone in wondering who painted our bathroom signs (Answer: Erik Dies).

As you grow communication is key, more so than an impressive reception area or a pool table; the systems real and digital that encourage communication, questions and curiosity ultimately matter more. Barista is the first step towards realizing our own 700 foot hallway and open door policy, but in a digital format that provides value to the whole organization and not just those in earshot of a good idea discussed over lunch.

If you’re interested in Bell Labs, I highly recommend Jon Gertner’s ‘The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation’

In July of ‘34, at the height the Hoover Dam’s construction, over 5,000 men were on site working for six separate companies, blasting rock, pouring concrete, wiring turbines, and moving canyon walls. Basically; getting epic stuff done. It’s awe inspiring, and for me the greater miracle is that this team built one of the great technical marvels of any time with only two essential project management tool: their voices (probably shouting) and confidence in co-workers.

We’re not building a dam at Percolate, I promise. There’s no Percolate concrete being poured on Broadway, I am confused by those wooden things that look like root beer barrels in Ikea furniture, no chance I’m rerouting water.

We might not be building a dam, but we are working as a team and doing it well. I wanted to share a little on how we do it.

Talk.
Things haven’t changed that much since ’34: talking still works. Weekly meetings involve every team member presenting their goals for the week and grading themselves on the previous week, while also encouraging everyone to ask for help if they need it. These meetings are important, because communicating helps us all get better and encourages listening, which may be even more valuable than the actual sharing. We are a relatively small team now, but as we grow this process will remain intact.

Be Clear.
We aim to communicate so anyone and everyone on the team can understand. Dom is a master at this, by beginning each project and feature with a story that easily translates to a vision and something that can be explained. We strive to use human language on everything from training documents to SOWs. Extending the Hoover Dam analogy, if you yelled your last email down a mine shaft would it be understood or would the foreman walk out of the mine and hit you in the mouth?

Care.
We strive to do things well because we care. Our clients are companies made up of interesting and nice people and we strive hard to build tools to make their jobs more enjoyable and easier. Our caring sparks healthy debates, passionate discussions about all of our features, and many late nights worrying if we made the right decision. But it also does something greater; it translates into the Percolate product constantly improving and our client projects being more enjoyable because we are vested in each and every one being great.

If your own interaction with coding or clients is small, it doesn’t lessen the impact you can have. Just because you’re a junior planner, you can still impact a project with something as simple as taking the extra second to be clear when communicating between teams or taking an extra pass over a presentation. How enjoyable is it when a customer service person slows down, really listens and helps you out? It’s awesome. We strive for that with everything.

Pick Good Tools.
It’s not all high-fives, coffee talk and hugs at Percolate.  Here are some tools we love.

Asana - Fantastic application for tracking tasks, mapping out our releases, assigning things to do and communicating through bugs and features. Love the interface, email functionality, clean design, and the satisfaction of checking things off.

Workflowy – Perfect, lightweight tool to outline a project or plan. It’s a really nice way to bullet out what has to happen or where things can be found.

GitHub – GitHub is makes it easy for us to code and see what is happening with each other’s code. The biggest difference between GitHub and document collaboration software is that it provides some mechanisms for helping several people work on the same file at once and logically “merge” all their work together, even over different times and conflicting changes.

Talk, care, pick some good tools and be clear with each other. Not much has changed since 1934.