Over the last 10 years, Atomic Object has grown from 7 to 43 employees. Here are a few ways we build connections between team members and keep our culture strong.

1. Mike Marsiglia and Drew Colthorp
www.atomicobject.com
Nurturing Top-notch
Tech Teams

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Our Challenge

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We are
poly-skilled,
co-located,
teams of makers

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helping companies
& entrepreneurs
create multi-platform
software products

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that people love to use.

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We love making awesome software,

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and we’re dedicated
to our culture,

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so as we grow,

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we want to hold on to the things

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that make
us strong
and
unique.

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Atomic in 2002 • 7 employees — all developers
• Close-knit
• Direct access to everyone
• Communication is easy

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Atomic GR in 2013
• 43 employees in two offices
• Developers, designers, testers,
and more
• Communication is a challenge

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How do we teach and
integrate new employees?
How do we build bonds?
How do we keep our culture
strong?
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Economics of AO

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Economics of AO
Annual class for new employees
The basics of how our business works:
• how we make money
• how we spend money
• how we stay competitive
• other metrics we care about
Taught by President or Vice President

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Economics of AO
Topics
• Basic financial terms
• How to read our profit and loss statement
• Our open books management
• How to use our company financial model to experiment
with ideas
We’re considering adding other classes:
• The Marketing of AO
• The Communication of AO
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Information Radiators

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Information Radiators
Why?
• Economics of AO not visible, not
on peoples’ minds.
• Want to encourage continual
awareness
• Radiators aren’t “Out of site, out of
mind”
• Encourages thinking that’s
consistent with the operation of the
company and business model.

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Information Radiators
Types
• Continuous Integration Monitor
• Stoplight
• Server Monitor
• Central Dashboard

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Central Dashboard

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Central Dashboard
Shows how busy/billable every employe is.
• X axis – Average hours/week for current quarter
• Y axis – Percentage of time spent on projects
Each person will fall into 1 of 3 quadrants:
• Green zone – Working full-time & highly utilized
• Yellow zone – Evaluate your non-billable activities;
are you using your time wisely?
• Red zone – Not meeting expectations
Utilization

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Central Dashboard
Possible Risks:
• Competition to have more hours
• Non-billable time isn’t bad – should just be
considered against other possible activities
(billable or not)
Utilization

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Central Dashboard
Each employee blogs every 40 days.
As your due date approaches, your
bar grows shorter.
• Yellow means 10 days left.
• Red means you’re overdue.
Blog Radiator

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Central Dashboard
Shows how our active projects
are testing.
Continuous Integration
Aggregator

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Central Dashboard
Real-time analytics via ChartBeat.Blog & Website Traffic

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Culture Pairs

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Culture Pairs
We practice pair programming – what about a
culture pair?
• Every new employee is assigned a culture pair
• Form a relationship
• Transmit AO culture
• Make it easy to ask questions
• Actively seek out opportunities to teach and learn
Mixed results: participation tends to drop off quickly.
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Pair Lunches

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Pair Lunches
Goal
• Foster personal relationships
Rules
• 2 employees have lunch
together
• Company pays
• Not more than once a month
for each pair
• Encouraged to talk about fun
or personal topics

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Pair Lunches
Graph shows our pair lunch
data for 2012:
• 228 pair lunches; that’s 450ish
hours of bonding
• Lots of people participated
• Lots of random connections
• Bold lines show common pairs
(they’re rare, which is good)

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Spin Down

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Spin Down
• Monthly Friday evening party w/bartender & snacks
• Chance to bond, share project stories
• Invite families, customers, sales opps, potential hires

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Workshop Series

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Workshop Series
Why?
• We’re becoming a
firm that specializes
in product dev.
• We all do design.
• Needed a way to
spread design
thinking about the
company.
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Strategy
Scenarios
Sketching
Planning
Prototypes
IA & IxD Patterns
Markup
Coding
Hi-fidelity
Design
Designers Developers

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Workshop Series
Internal, crowd-sourced professional dev. series
• 10 Workshops (5 after work with beer & 5 during lunch)
• Average attendance: 22 (Min: 18, Max: 30)
Topics included
• What is design?
• Storytelling
• Design thinking
• Visualizing ideas
• Visualizing data

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Tactic Cost Impact
Economics of AO 2 hours per new employee Business understanding
Information Radiators
Design and
Development time
Personal responsibility
Culture Pair Free Distributed management
Pair Lunches $28 per pair lunch Personal relationships
Spin Down $500 per event Personal relationships
Design Series $19/hr of training Broader design knowledge