Organization and Way of Working
The engineering team is divided into smaller cross functional project teams that each focus on a specific goal or target, where some groups are long-lived, and some are short-lived, depending on how big the goal or deliverable is. We strive to create groups which are cross-functional and able to complete their goals without dependence on other teams, even though this is of course not always possible.
Groups track goals on a yearly and quarterly basis with goal follow-up across the entire engineering organization on a bi-weekly basis. Most groups do internal planning on a bi-weekly basis, but in the end it’s up to the group to decide how they want to work.
We have, however, mandated that all groups must present their progress or failures or hacks at our bi-weekly engineering demo, a fun meeting/presentation where we talk about everything from short-circuiting power-modules, how hard it is to calibrate cameras or align polygons in space, to neat new command line tools for operations, a new auth mechanism in the backend, a cool new way to visualize health data or a new feature which helps our doctors be more productive.
We have a flexible workplace that focuses on work/life balance, and we strongly believe in our mission but do not think that achieving it requires sacrificing everything else.