Building a strong startup developer culture requires constant adjustment

Most tech startups are born from a few early engineers building the company’s initial product. As those first builders work together, they begin to establish a developer culture — sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.

At Web Summit in Lisbon in November, two founders discussed the importance of building a developer culture that’s distinct from a company’s overall culture.

According to Shensi Ding, co-founder and CEO at Merge, a unified API startup, early developer ethos is particularly important inside tech startups, where engineers ultimately control how the product gets built and what gets prioritized. She says her co-founder, CTO Gil Feig, worked to set a positive tone from the start that empowered the team.

“He really instilled in us early on that engineers can, from the very beginning, decide that we can do anything. It just depends on how much time you want to allocate to [a particular task]. And we really wanted to instill that in the developer culture early on,” she said.

Ludmila Pontremolez, CTO and co-founder at Zippi, a Brazilian fintech startup, spent time as an engineer at Square prior to launching Zippi. She wanted to build a team-focused atmosphere: Regardless of who wrote the code, everyone is responsible for it. “Every mistake everyone makes is everyone’s responsibility,” she said. “When there’s something broken in production, Sunday at 1 a.m., it’s probably not the person who wrote the code that’s going to fix it, but whoever is in charge of looking after the servers at the time.”

“So we instill a lot of that communal thinking and how we’re writing code for everyone on the team. It’s not just about whether you should be building something faster. It is about what’s the legacy you’re leaving behind.”

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Ding said that as she and Feig were engineers prior to building Merge, they wanted to create an atmosphere at their company where it was encouraged to take individual initiative and where all engineers owned the product collectively. “Early on, one thing that we really tried to do was lead by example. . . . We would set expectations, like you can just make these decisions for us. And we would also talk a lot about what the impact of what they were doing was because we really wanted to set that foundation early on that they weren’t going to be just task receivers and doers. They were going to be an integral part of the company,” she said.

A big piece of creating that culture is making sure that the group is diverse, and the earlier that can happen the better. Ding said, especially as a woman, that she wanted to deliberately create a tolerant and accepting environment.

“I’ve definitely been in companies where as a young woman, you’ll say something and you feel like people think you’re stupid or they don’t respect what you’re saying,” she said. “And I really want to make sure that everyone in the company is creating a great environment for young women [and others] to feel comfortable saying whatever they want.”

When hiring, it’s important to source and recruit diverse candidates, but that in itself isn’t enough, Ding said. “You can’t bring people in and expect them to change the environment. You have to have a great environment for them in the first place,” she said.

As a startup grows, and other areas of the business begin to take shape, the engineering team becomes a more distinct group, and as such has to define its own culture within the broader organization. Part of that is building their own ways to drive more efficient work.

Whatever workflows are put in place, adjustments will have to be made continually as the group grows. “I don’t know if I have a perfect answer for [finding a single way of working]. I’m sure [our processes] break all the time,” she said. So they keep trying new ways of working, knowing that at some point, it’s going to need to be adjusted again. “I think it’s really hard for companies to find a [single] process that will scale with them over time.”

Pontremolez says that her company recently wrote down its development values and what it believes in a software engineering manifesto to help new engineers understand how they fit in when they come on board. But she says that at their stage she doesn’t necessarily want to put hard and fast rules in place. “I think the toughest part about grading processes is separating individuals doing things that are not what you desire and not turning those episodes into rules that apply to everyone.”

For example, she said that if someone doesn’t properly deploy code, you don’t want to necessarily make a rule that developers can no longer deploy independently, something she would consider an overreaction to a single incident. It’s important to balance the needs of the overall company, especially at an early-stage startup, with whatever rules and processes you put in place.

But Pontremolez says that as you add more people, it’s important to help them “connect the dots” between engineering and what the startup is trying to accomplish, so they understand how their contributions fit into the overall goals of the organization.

What’s clear is that building a developer culture doesn’t ever really end. As the company grows and moves through different stages, the developer group will have to adjust to each new reality, and the founders or other management will have to help facilitate that.