How we work

No big separate functions. No layers of communication. No complex approval chains. A single project team goes from idea to deploy independently. Read our Operational Principles and Work Principles for the philosophy behind this structure.

Sprints

We run 1-week sprints. A new sprint starts immediately after the previous one ends. Sprint planning happens with the Scrum Team and Product Owner at the start of each cycle. Sprint goals are published on the OKRs page.

Daily standups and check-ins

Every day starts with a standup and ends with a check-in. Three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• What blockers do you have?

Backlog grooming happens regularly to make sure upcoming work is scoped, estimated, and ready to pick up.

Show & tell

End of each week. We celebrate sprint work. People talk about what shipped, problems they worked on, solutions they found. The team votes on a winner who takes home the Golden Mic for the week.

We write issues, not user stories

An issue only needs three things: title, team, and status. Break it down as small as possible. Assign it to a single owner.

Why not user stories? They add overhead without value. A roundabout way to describe tasks. Time-consuming to write. Complicated to scope. They don't match real conversations about what needs to get built.

Development flow

Every feature moves through 9 stages. Each stage has clear ownership and exit criteria. See our Engineering Principles for the technical standards behind each step.

1. 1Planning -- define scope and purpose. Agree on what we're building and why before anything else starts.
2. 2Product documentation -- determine requirements, write specs, create mocks. The product owner owns this.
3. 3Backlog grooming -- developers scope the work, estimate effort, and break it into issues.
4. 4Backend development -- implementation, API testing collections, unit tests, code review. Nothing merges without review.
5. 5API testing -- QA automates test cases against the API. Bugs get assigned back to the owner.
6. 6Design & prototyping -- high-fidelity mocks in Figma. Visual design happens after backend work is solid.
7. 7Frontend development -- build the UI on top of working backend functionality. No frontend work starts without a working API.
8. 8Functional testing -- the product owner manually tests the full flow. If it doesn't work end to end, it goes back.
9. 9Deployment -- push to production. Run regression tests. Monitor for issues.