Guilds and Teams

Table of Contents

• List of Guilds
  • Monthly Guild Meetings
• Cross-Functional Teams
• Other Informal Groups
• Training at Countable
• Performance Evaluation Policy
• Team Event Basics

Purpose

Countable is divided into Guilds and Teams. The job of Guilds is to be really good at specific things, and the job of Teams is to get results for customers.

Scope

This document lists our existing Guilds and Teams.

List of Guilds

• Developers - Their goal is to improve our code, solve problems for users, and demonstrate working software to our team every day.
• Operations - Their goal is maintaining clear and open communication with our clients, and maintaining the roadmap to sustainable growth for our firm.

Monthly Guild Meetings

Each month we hold a meeting for any technical specialty the team is interested in. Currently there’s a developer’s guild meet, a devops meet, an operations meet, and a design/ux guild meet.

Dev Guild presentation guidelines:Good:

• use real code examples
• focus on how it relates to our team and company
• discuss a real problem our team faces or opportunity to improve
• other topics are ok too, but please propose your topic for review first to establish why you want to cover it
• interactive portions are great! (ie mob coding)

Avoid:

• Too many “my favourite framework” talks, unless you’ve used the tool yourself and want to present specific opportunities for our team.
• Focusing entirely on performance and other public information

Cross-Functional Teams

We have cross-functional teams organized by Objective. For example, we have a bawkbox team whose top level objective is to make it easy for any website to install any 3rd party widget.

With each of our clients, we form a team with some of our staff.

Countable does not have functional team divisions by job role.

TODO

further refine my first pass at defining Cortico relationship below

Countable helped develop Cortico, and our team still serve as the active developers on the software itself. When working on Cortico as a Countable developer, treat the work and working relationship as you would that with any of our clients, even though there’s a bit more “in-house” feel within our close team!

Other Informal Groups

On some occasions other groups may organize for professional development or other purposes. These are not teams in our company’s terminology.

Training at Countable

We have official training materials here: Training. Bill for your time doing any of these.

Books

If you buy a book for work, the company will reimburse you.

Suggested reading in References that has influenced our culture and methods.

Performance Evaluation Policy

See our dedicated Evaluation processes.

Team Event Basics

As a company with remote employees, we intend that half of recreational events can be attended online.

When in-person events are held in just one city, employees may self-organize events in their respective cities and be reimbursed by Countable.

The default cap is $25/person, for other amounts please get approval from your manager.

We are aiming to do more consistent and repeated virtual events- if you have an idea for something cool we can all try out online, please share it in Slack!