How We Live Our Cultural Values Every Day

Note: This blog was updated in August 2019 with the latest information about our team and cultural values.

---

In the last few years, we scaled our products, welcomed hundreds of humans of data to our community, powered data teams around the world, and celebrated countless milestones. The people who find their way to our team are extraordinarily diverse, yet they’re all motivated by the desire to power great data teams while learning and growing from the people around them.

As our team grows, we are constantly re-thinking how to push the ways in which we work together. A strong company culture has always been core to us at Atlan. We’ve spoken about it widely, and we hold “culture fit” at the core of our hiring process. But as we scaled, the term “culture” became more and more ambiguous. It became difficult to assess candidates objectively for “culture fit” because every interviewer’s definition of “culture” was different. We increasingly saw the need to identify our true cultural values.

After quite a bit of reading about how companies define their cultural values, we came across this gem of a report from Harvard Business Review.

Leaders die, products become obsolete, markets change, new technologies emerge, and management fads come and go, but core ideology in a great company endures as a source of guidance and inspiration.

Harvard Business Review

As the report suggests, values can’t be created. Instead, we needed to look back on the pivotal moments in our history — the actions that had defined the way we made difficult decisions or chose the way forward. We convened our most veteran teammates, and with the help of a “Mars Group” exercise, pulled out six values that we believe have shaped our growth and mission from the very beginning. With each value, we asked ourselves:

Can you envision them being as valid for you 100 years from now as they are today? Would you want to hold those core values, even if at some point one or more of them became a competitive disadvantage? If you were to start a new organization tomorrow in a different line of work, what core values would you build into the new organization regardless of its industry?

Now we finally have names for the cultural values we’ve always been acting upon, and we keep overhearing them in daily conversations. Not to mention, they’ve found a wall for themselves in our office!

Most recently, I caught up with a few teammates to chat about what those values actually feel like at Atlan. Keep reading to see for yourself!

Bias for Action

First and foremost is a bias for action. Cited originally as one of Amazon’s leading principles, this belief also rings true at Atlan. When we see a problem, our instinct is to tackle it head on.

In a new member’s first week, she noticed grammar issues in our blog. She could have easily pointed it out as someone else’s problem to fix. Instead, she asked for the WordPress login ID and took it upon herself to fix the content herself!

Prukalpa Sankar, Co-Founder

We will always value people who believe in actions — those who think big and turn their dreams into work toward our goals. We encourage each other to push boundaries and carry out our ideas. Sometimes even a bad decision is better than no decision!

One thing that makes Atlan different from other places I’ve worked is the amount of time and space I’ve been given for personal growth. For a month or two I contributed very little overall because I was sitting with our website and learning how to build it. I didn’t have that much output then, but now I can run the website! I’ve learned 90% of what I do today on the job.

Christine Garcia, Principal Content Strategist

Never Be Satisfied

Every day, our teams put their heads together to think about the impossible. We think big here, and the resolve to never be satisfied is one that we care deeply about maintaining. We refuse to get too comfortable in our skin. We push ourselves to do more. Individually, we trust each other to hold one another accountable to growing ourselves and our work exponentially, every single day.

No individual is fixated towards conforming to an ‘industry standard’ but rather challenges to become the best at what they really want to do and execute to get there. Each day we work hard by putting ourselves out there, going above and beyond to empower our customers with the most delightful data experience unlike never before.

Every pixel, line of code and content, sales or support call is executed with the stride to become the powerful force behind the best data teams. With every interaction, we are trying to redefine and push the values of what it means to be close to the customers.

Divyansh Saini, Data Success Manager

I asked Gaurav what “success” at Atlan looks like. “Great, but brief”, he laughed, “because then you follow it up with another attempt or initiative.”

We may be doing something that is completely opposite to what we did yesterday because we’re still working things out, and that’s okay! It’s only by succeeding and failing that we figure out how to move forward.

Gaurav Singh, Senior Marketer

Gaurav’s right, for every success there’s probably a fail that came along with it. We support each other in taking the time to learn new tools and innovate, even if that means learning from the mistakes that come along with it. But that doesn’t mean we always agree with each other! In fact, our ability to foster an environment where feedback is freely and openly given is something that our co-founders stood by from the very start.

Being Straightforward

Being straightforward is not only encouraged but expected. At the beginning of 2017, we decided to implement quarterly 360 reviews — a feedback process that allows team members to receive feedback from their peers, colleagues and team leaders, and complete a self-assessment of their work during the previous quarter.

But at Atlan, there is an understanding that if you’re not continually and proactively giving feedback — especially when it’s time-sensitive or in reaction to an incident — you’re actually doing your teammates a disservice.

As a team leader, it’s very important for my team to trust me as someone who can lead the product. By being straightforward and candid with my feedback, I was able to build that trust. It’s amazing to see everybody on the team feel comfortable about sharing their opinions and giving feedback, irrespective of their job roles. Since all of us are honest about our strengths and weaknesses, we then together work towards helping each other get better. 

Tanay Agrawal, Product Manager

Christine recalls a time when she spent two hours debating with Prukalpa about the company’s next steps. She says Prukalpa “took it in stride” and instead of shutting down the conversation, said “Let’s talk about it.”

At Atlan, we can challenge anyone about anything as long as we have reasons.

Christine Garcia, Principal Content Strategist

Being straightforward is key at Atlan. To solidify this value, the team went back and forth debating the idea of “transparency” versus “straightforwardness”, and turned to the guiding questions from the HBR article to help resolve this debate. While the two cultural values certainly overlap in the quest for open and honest communication, we realized that transparency implies disseminating information, regardless of context or consequence.

Like many tech companies, we use public Slack channels to increase the transparency across our teams and frequently hold AMA sessions with our co-founders. But we also understand that there are times when holding confidential and/or sensitive information will be critical. Being straightforward with the information and ideas that we do share, however, was something we could commit to no matter what the situation.

Giving 120%

In addition to encouraging the free flow of ideas and opinions, another expectation is that we are all giving 120% — making sure that our current work is executed to the best of our abilities. This means not just repeating a mundane process, but raising the bar each time we do it. It means taking the time to think about how we can work smarter and faster, how we can save time, and how we can make each others’ lives easier.

What’s important is taking full ownership of what you do, no matter what it takes.

Vipul Bhavsar, Senior Software Engineer

As a newer member of the company, Himanshu noticed this value in his teammates immediately:

Going that extra mile … is what life is about and that is where the excitement and challenges lie! This is what differentiates who we are.

Himanshu Sikaria, Data Science Lead

Problem First, Solution Second

After working on data projects of different scales, we realized that while working with data, the human context is as significant as the data that helps in getting insights. The realization of this came from our value problem first, solution second.

I love that our values drive every aspect of our work, anything that we do for our team, community, or for our customers. In order to truly help data teams do their lives’ best work, we first try to understand the underlying problem that they face before offering any solution. There is never a rush in offering what we have already built, but a patient attitude. We not only understand the problems at hand ourselves, but also help our customers to figure where the actual bottleneck exists, and where exactly can we add value.

Ankita Mathur, Data Success Manager

Problem first, solution second is how we like to approach things. The new features that our engineers build are a direct result of what our users need.

When building for data teams around the world, it’s very important for our team to understand their problem and dig deeper into the why. If we are not able to help data teams do better work with data, we haven’t done our job.

One Team

The best part about working at Atlan is that your personal growth is a vector product of all the people around you. This pushes me and everyone else on the team to see each other as entrepreneurs with strong individual ownership and bigger, larger accountability to the team, our customers and our mission statement.

Divyansh Saini, Data Success Manager

Lastly is the value of one team. This comes into play both in and out of the office. We take the time to get to know each other — often over meals or games of Captain’s Ball — because we know that forming those personal bonds makes us a stronger company.

I’ve never seen this kind of empathy in a workplace. If a person did not come through on a deliverable, the understanding is that would be a bigger priority behind their delay, because the benchmark is to always deliver what you’ve committed to. In another workplace, I would get a message saying, “Why isn’t this on my desk?” At Atlan, it’s, “Hey, I’m guessing you’ve been caught up with something else, let me know when you can get it to me.” That keeps all of us going. When you know the other person trusts in you that much, you want to go the extra mile to deliver.

Mukund Tripathi, Senior Software Engineer

Every company goes through ups and downs, but we come together to face challenging times head on, and we’ll use every opportunity we get to build a more resilient team.

When we are working on something, we put our heart and soul into it, so once we actually achieve something, the happiness that comes is amazing. The entire team celebrates and shares in it, everyone participates in that success, not just one or two people.

Ankita Mathur, Data Success Manager

---

Note: This blog was coauthored by Jessi Heger and Leena Soni.