How Growth Impacts Infobip's Values

Infobip is a high-growth company, a unicorn, so it's important to understand how the scale of it impacts our values and vice-versa!

Our industry-standard is at constant change, very much like the world we all live in. As individuals and engineering professionals, we're constantly faced with different degrees of uncertainty, ranging from simple problems with a couple of different solutions, to wicked problems with high levels of complexity, uncertainty, and unknowns.

Professionally, you become painfully aware of uncertainty the moment you start working out of your own garage, our founders learned that lesson early on. Infobip didn't start out as a global messaging platform, it started out as a platform aimed towards the municipality of Vodnjan, the hometown of our founders, and they didn't succeed at first.

We'd have to check with them personally how they felt during this period, but it definitely had to be frightening in some way. You're trying to reach a competitive edge and there's no simple way or recipe for doing that. The factors you have taken into account in yesterday's planning can dramatically change in a matter of days.

So in order to combat uncertainty, you decide you need to be flexible. Plan well but be aware that sometimes things will be out of control and you'll need to adapt. And that's fine! At first, this sounds counter-intuitive, it's inherently human to desire stability, right? That's 100% true, but... we're all a part of this dynamic environment, putting the majority of our effort into retaining maximum rigidity would mean missing multiple opportunities to grow and learn as individuals, and on a company level, it would ultimately break us.

Relatively quickly you realize that flexibility has its limits, it's not a silver bullet and too much flexibility breeds chaos. Planning while keeping in mind the current state will inevitably always include more layers of uncertainty. The next logical step is to experiment more, challenge, and shape the environment instead of letting it shape you..

If you ever tried to challenge your environment you know this isn't easy and more often it goes bad rather than good. But that's also okay, experimentation takes courage and it's good to fail fast and learn fast. There is no progress without innovation and no innovation without experimentation. What this means for our engineers is an opportunity to leave their personal mark in our landscape, and this is one of the reasons why Infobip is a Unicorn today.

But again... experimentation also has potential drawbacks.

Many competing ideas and a lot of things happening in the same time are just to name a few... So why do we still feel comfortable pushing and encouraging it? We won’t give you a life changing answer here, it just works for us. From changing and evolving our hackathon format with each iteration, to a more technical story of our public HTTP API.

It started life as just one servlet in a monolithic application for sending SMS, then it spawned off into a stand-alone service and got a dedicated development team. And once the number of features we wanted to expose to clients, and thus the number of teams working on them, grew this one API dev team became a bottleneck. We experimented some more and developed a cross between API gateway and a script running application so that each feature team could script handlers for their particular API endpoints.

What we're trying to say is this ties in great to the fact that from the moment you join we believe you're a great person and we trust you. This is how we strive to build all our teams, around trust and self-managed. One of the first steps towards creating self-managing teams is definitely our interview process. Our existing team members have an opportunity to meet you, our potential future peer, prior to you receiving a formal job offer. But that's just one of many steps we take to ensure better collaboration.

All ideas are worthy and discussing those ideas is how we grow our knowledge and mutual understanding. Whole teams are invited to discuss whenever we're implementing a new feature. The best solutions emerge when you rely on the experience of whole teams rather than individuals. Co-creating solutions together simply make us happier people and having autonomy and trust just feels good. It's simple as that :) Or to put it another way, you're the person who best understands the product you're working on, and we trust you with owning it. It's on us to create an environment that supports your work through a variety of Enablers.

This sounds really good, but you're probably thinking all of this is hard to achieve in general, and even harder on our scale. Our answer is introduce / infuse simplicity wherever possible. One of the things we feared most about our rapid growth was that it would result in a complex organization with a deep hierarchical structure. A deep structure has a higher risk of issues when relaying important messages and often times has a lot of bureaucracy. Without hierarchical simplicity it would be hard for us to be flexible, experiment, and support self-management. If you want to know the details, you can explore our org hierarchy by taking a look at our Job Architecture.

But organizational simplicity is one thing, day to day simplicity is a completely different beast. It's here that complexity finds it especially easy to creep in and generate a lot of waste. That's why we're always searching for new ways to eliminate that complexity by aligning on our processes on a higher level with solutions such as OKRs, One company backlog, introducing LeSS as a methodology, and many more...

The tricky thing with this is, sometimes introducing a novelty that will assure simplicity on a department level in the future, creates short-term bursts of added complexity, and we're well aware of that. One of the more recent examples was our transition from One team Scrums to LeSS, we had to assess existing Scrum practices and build upon them across the whole department. This meant that roughly a hundred teams had to evolve their way of work and this transition took time, trust, and patience. In the case of LeSS, we're out of the complex woods, but our journey isn't over. We're continuously inspecting our practice, sharing opinions, and adapting to make it truly our own.

Taking all of this into account, we still sometimes reminisce how day-to-day work was in some ways much simpler when the department was just 50-100 people, but rather than discouraging us it motivates us to continuously evolve our processes, culture, and overall work environment.