Our engineering culture is motivated by Benjiâs (my Co-founder and CEO) and my belief that a small, talented team, given the right environment, can build high-quality software fast (and work regular hours!). We do it through:
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Minimal process with ownership over decisions normally made by product and design
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Natural collaboration and deliberate communication
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Investing in tools and abstractions that give us leverage
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Putting effort into building a diverse team
Minimal Process & Lots of Ownership
The best engineers weâve worked with delivered reliably magical outcomes. They took customer problems and relentlessly drove them to solutions that were not only successful but often brilliant and creative. While they did this with minimal oversight, stakeholders were never in the dark as to what was going on, and no setback was a surprise.
Traditional product-development processes arenât meant for the best engineers. Their purpose is to create consistent outcomes regardless of the engineerâs skill. But, consistency comes at the expense of an engineerâs time and freedomâboth ingredients necessary to generate those magical outcomes. As a result, process stifles the best engineers and doesnât give others the opportunity to practice the behaviors that made the best engineers the âbest.â
At Ashby, we want to build an environment that encourages every engineer to be their best. So, at Ashby, every Engineer runs their project. Product Managers (and Designers) build strategy, do customer research, and hand off problem briefs to Engineers. Engineers take on the rest: they research the problem, write product specs, build wireframes, and implement their solution end-to-end. We rely on engineers, not process, to push information outward to the relevant folks (e.g., Product Managers) and pull folks in to help (e.g., Designers, Infra). Itâs a new level of ownership for many engineers, but weâd rather an engineer fail a bit and coach up their skills than use process as a crutch. Not everyone succeeds in our culture, but those who do thrive.
Collaboration is Natural & Communication is Deliberate
Our engineering team consists of lifelong learners who are talented but also humble and kind (meet them here!). These attributes create an environment where collaboration happens naturally. We combine this with research, prototyping, and written proposals to see around corners and get feedback from the team across time zones. Focus time is something that we hold sacred, and, with thoughtful and deliberate communication, engineers are in <2h meetings per week (I wrote about it here).
To drive it home, hereâs a recent calendar of an engineer who has been with us for over 4 years. ~34 hours of focus time, 2.5h of interviews, and 3.5 hours of meetings:
We also meet in person at least twice a year, once as a department and once as a company. You also have a small budget to meet up with folks in your city/region.
Increase Leverage, not Team Size
We built Ashby with the quality, breadth, and depth that many customers would expect from much larger teams over larger time scales. Weâve done this through investment in:
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Great developer tooling. Our CI/CD takes ~10m, and we deploy at least 15x a day. A debugger that works out of the box. Everyone on the team has contributed to our developer experience đŞđž.
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Building blocks to create powerful and customizable products fast. At the core of Ashby is a set of common components (analytics modeling and query language, policy engine, workflow engine, design system) that we constantly improve. Each improvement to a common component cascades throughout our app (short video below).
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AI-powered tooling. We think of AI as a way to automate the mundane parts of building and maintaining high-quality software. We use a combination of third-party and internally built tools that, for instance, auto-triage customer issues, suggest fixes, prototype ideas, generate production-ready code, and conduct code reviews. Engineers have an unlimited token budget (but are not measured on it). We write in detail about our philosophy, current use of AI, and future plans for AI in Engineering here.
Hereâs an impromptu quote from Arjun in our company Slack of what itâs like to build a feature at Ashby:
And a demo of one of these building blocks:
Put Effort into Diversity
Diverse teams drive innovation and better outcomes. Having seen my mother and partner build their careers as minority women in non-diverse fields, I want to make sure Ashby creates opportunities for the next generation of engineers from underrepresented groups.
Today, 25% of engineers and 50% of our engineering leaders at Ashby are from underrepresented groups. We are taking conscious steps to improve, like sourcing diverse candidates, providing generous paid family leave, no leetcode interviews, and more.
Work-Life Balance: Itâs A Marathon, Not a Sprint
The intensity of work at Ashby should feel like a marathon, not a sprint (nor speed-walking). We work with urgency and ambition to build excellent software, but we donât need to prove out a new software category or product-market fit. That requires ingenuity and thoughtfulness, and that doesnât happen with unrealistic deadlines or sleepless nights.
Our remote, low-meeting, high-ownership culture gives you a lot of flexibility in how you structure your days and weeks. In practice, that means you keep your own hours, but there will be moments of intensity, like launching your feature at our annual user conference. We offer unlimited PTO, and you actually get to use it. Some of our most exceptional engineers take almost 30 days of vacation per year.
This way of working allows many of us on the team to be active parents, including Benji and me. I block off 1.5 hours every morning to spend with my daughter and drop her off at school. Mujda (Product Engineer) puts it best in an article about us: âI can say that Ashby is a great place to be a mom⌠No one bats an eye if I have to take my kid to a doctorâs appointment or have to work weird hours because childcare fell through.â