Last time, our Engineering team talked about the challenges they face in a hyper-growth environment. Well, we are still looking for new talent, and this time Hendrik Haandrikman (VP of Growth) and Katie Kenney (VP of Customer Success) share their thoughts on hiring, team culture, and serving a rapidly growing customer base.
- What is Bitrise?
Katie Kenney (KK): Bitrise is a Continuous Integration and Delivery Platform with a focus on mobile app development. We make it easier for developers to build better apps, faster, with less time wasted on setup and maintenance and more time spent on meaningful work.
- What sets Bitrise apart from other companies?
Hendrik Haandrikman (HH): We make a thing people want. This sounds ‘obvious’, but it’s really not. Especially as a marketer, you often spend most of your time making people want things. At Bitrise, my job is really just explaining what we do and making sure as many developers as possible hear about it because we solve a very real problem for mobile devs and the businesses that employ them.
- What are the challenges that come with working at a scale-up?
KK: Bitrise is growing fast! Not only in customer base, but the team is growing rapidly! It’s always exciting to see the Monday morning posts announcing the new members of the team. We have a strong culture of collaboration, and as we continue to grow and add more structure to roles, it’s really important to us that we don’t lose that. The Bitrise team is continuously assessing the ways we work together, and ensuring that we function as one team.
When growing at the rate that we are, it’s so easy to create silos and communication breakdowns, but we’re consciously addressing this head on to ensure we don’t make that mistake at Bitrise.
We’re very open in our communications and transparent with one another. There’s a great feedback culture, and we’re always striving for ways to improve ourselves and our company.
HH: I think it was Reid Hoffman who described building a company as jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down. That’s as good an analogy as any. Sure, we’ve found something that people want, but now what? How do you grow the product, team, and business, while staying agile enough to adapt to constantly changing requirements from the market, customers, and your organization? For us, a lot of the answer in that lies in empowerment: Making sure that teams and even individuals have the necessary skill, context and sense of ownership to make meaningful decisions about their work, fast. We hire for each of these characteristics, but they’re also ingrained in the culture:
- We provide extensive learning and development opportunities, coupled with a lively feedback culture to ensure people continuously ‘skill-up’
- We provide unfettered access to data, the customers and each other to ensure that people have as much of the context as possible when deciding how to focus their energies
- We cultivate a sense of ownership by celebrating victories, while blamelessly acknowledging failures. If you ensure that people feel comfortable in owning the mistakes, as well as the successes, they’re much more able to take calculated risks, improve and share learnings with the whole team
- What is at the core of the Bitrise team culture?
HH: Grow, make mistakes, learn, and win, together, and don't be a d!ck about it.
- What do people get from Bitrise if they join?
KK: People that join Bitrise get to be part of an awesome team during a really exciting stage of growth. Everyone that joins gets to be part of building the company. We seek to align the team and be transparent around our mission and goals so that everyone is aware of how they are helping to drive the company forward.
We want our teams to have all the information and knowledge they need to feel empowered to make decisions and move things forward, and this all is possible due to transparency and trust in one another to do the right thing.
HH: The type of people we hire could work anywhere, but choose Bitrise for the ability to have an impact. There are literal billions (with a b) of app installs every year, that have passed through Bitrise before they made it onto someone’s mobile device. With thousands of paying customers all around the globe, you’d be hard-pressed to find a phone that doesn’t have — at least — one app that was built using Bitrise. Working at Bitrise means playing a role in making all of that happen.
- Who are we looking for & what positions are open?
KK: The Customer Success team is growing rapidly! We have tons of open positions right now in both Hungary and the US - from Support Reps and Support Engineers to Customer Success Managers! We’re looking for people to join our team who have a passion to ensure our customers have the best experience with Bitrise. We’re looking for driven and enthusiastic people that have and “can do” attitude that wants to be part of a truly collaborative team.
HH: The Growth team is continuously evolving, and we’re currently adding to our capacity to address our growing Japanese market and I’m keeping an eye out for a world-class product marketing leader.
Under challenging circumstances all over, we’re still growing and we’re still looking to add new talent to the team to help drive that growth. Check out all our open positions!
